HowTo Compile rTorrent From SVN In Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Author: Stephan Jau
Revision: v1.0
Last Change: May 15 2008

Introduction

Torrent is a great way to transfer large files very quickly. However most torrent clients are gui based and have quite some impact on system resources (e.g. Azureus). rTorrent is a lightweight client running from the terminal. Being able to run it in a screen session (also upon boot) makes it ideal to also control it from a remote location.

How to use, support & help

The rTorrent homepage can be found here.
A basic guide on how to use rTorrent can be found here.
There's an irc support channel on irc.freenode.org #rtorrent and the official support channel is to be found on irc.worldforgenet.org #libtorrent

Assumptions

In this tutorial I will use the defaults user home location and will download all the SVN files there. Specifically I'll use ~/rtorrent for the SVN files. Further you are supposed not to be logged in as root but as a normal user.

1. Get required packages

sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential libtool automake1.9 openssl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libsigc++-2.0-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

Note: Automake must be a newer version than 1.4. So other automake versions work also. I just used 1.9 here because I need it for something else also.

2. Create the rtorrent download folder

mkdir ~/rtorrent

3. Go to the rtorrent download folder

cd ~/rtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent

4. Then get the latest trunk version

svn co svn://rakshasa.no/libtorrent/trunk

5. Enter the trunk folder

cd trunk

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk

6. Update rTorrent to the latest SVN version

svn up

7. Go to the libtorrent folder

cd libtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk/libtorrent

8. Run the autogen script

./autogen.sh

9. Configure it

./configure

10. Compile libtorrent

make

11. Install libtorrent on the system

sudo make install

12. Alter /etc/ld.so.conf

echo "include /usr/local/lib" | sudo tee -a /etc/ld.so.conf

13. Rebuild the ld.so cache

sudo ldconfig

14. Go to the rTorrent folder

cd ../rtorrent

Current location: /home/USER/rtorrent/trunk/rtorrent

15. Run the autogen script

./autogen.sh

 16. Configure it

./configure

17. Compile rTorrent

make

18. Install rTorrent on the system

sudo make install

19. Run rTorrent

rtorrent

That's it and enjoy!

Update to newest version

If you want to update rTorrent later to the newest version, just start with step (6) from this howto.