Monday, June 26, 2006

something new

two weeks ago I spent about 2 hours late one night watching my windows xp computer primarly used for downloading torrents DIE because of a virus, despite the fact it had real time virus scan and frequent full scans by Avast! - which, I still think is pretty good.

I was angry enough to change something in the equation, and instead of stacking antivirus, figued it was time to raise the white flag to windows and install something a bit more cumbersome.

Ubuntu 6.06 looked easy enough to install, yet after two days I decided I was in the elite few that need the alternate disk (no live cd here) and it installed flawlessly.

I tried Azureus and about 5 other torrent clients, but none of them had the speed of uTorrent in windows. so, why not uTorrent in Linux?

I went all out and installed the newest 1.06 release candiate of uTorrent, and WINE. Well, the standard wine seems to have some problems with network in uTorrents context, so a quick upgrade to a derivitive and some command line garble (my college class of 1 week in linux is coming back to me now, no, seriously - i must have learned something)

so, check my screenshot, and just remember Ubuntu tries to be a cross over OS so hard, that it refers to VNC as remote desktop; this only took me 20 minutes of installing VNC to determine it was already there as a alias.



this was a nice boost. Ubuntu seems to have a lot of interest in their community.
I am wondering if gentoo would be faster, though.

6 comments:

forkev said...

good news.
i ran BitTornado for about 10 days, maxing out at about 20KB down and 40KB up, but averaging more around 10 for a fast tracker and many peers.

I login this morning to check on the uTorrent solution and it's pulling 120KB down and i capped the 60KB up.

i think I'm back to what I thought I left for dead in windows!

k2h said...

thats encouraging to see a serious alternate to the borg, I Mean B. gates. I have not yet been able to sever my connection to the queen.

forkev said...

i must have too many services running that I don't need with a non-optimized kernal, and poor video drivers because regular performance of just web browsing and opening stuff is horrendlsy slow compared to xp on the same box. this surprised me greatly.
I updated the guts (kernel, i think) to the pentium compile and not the generic 386 with a bit of improvement. but windows for what it represents is considerably faster on the same hardware. maybe ubuntu just needs some tweeking - but for a torrent client, it's just was I was looking for.

k2h said...

I kind of felt the same way when I ran a live cd on my laptop awhile ago. for what linux is SUPPOSE to be (highly optimized, highly configurable for nerds) I'm starting to question what happened to is? I'm glad its not just in my head.

Unknown said...

i have been disappointed with the nerd running the linux boxes at school for the NMR. he couldn't get it to auto-mount memory sticks for file transferring purposes and since he was running some weird super virtual drive mount system i couldn't get my trusty knoppix cd to see the drives, though it could see my usb stick. basically the guy didn't want to give permission to mount stuff to the users because that gave too many permissions or something. it is disappointing that linux (or the nerd) couldn't figure out how to make that kind of permission to work right.

forkev said...

what i have grown to respect about ubuntu is that it WILL let me do even the most simple tasks, but prompt me for su (super user) password before doing so. So i start a process, it rings back with 'need permission' and then it goes. this is a very elegent method for keeping the security tight for my 1 man crew. the problem is, it gets a bit more harry for cron (think windows schedular) processes, but not too bad.