Transmission is a popular bit torrent client, but I don’t know why it is not officially inside the Ubuntu repository. So, if you want to run Transmission, you need to build it from the source code. And from Transmission official web site, it also doesn’t provide a very clear instruction how to do it.

Below a detail walk through:

First, download the source code.

Then while downloading it, you will need openssl-dev and libgtk2.0-dev to install on your desktop then your compilation will make it.

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libgtk2.0-dev 

Extract the source code. By default it will create in a folder called “transmission-1.32”

tar xvjf transmission-1.32.tar.bz2
cd transmission-1.32

Build the source code

./configure –prefix=/opt/transmission
make
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /opt/transmission/bin/transmission /usr/local/bin/transmission
sudo ln -s /opt/transmission/bin/transmissioncli /usr/local/bin/transmissioncli

Just type transmission then you can run it. While you can delete the temporary folder “transmission-1.32” you have created early.

One of my favourite applications on Windows, Launchy has finally come to Linux! I heavily rely on this software on Windows instead of looking for the software I want from the Start Menu.

Besides Launchy, there are also similar software for Linux, such as Gnome Do, but I’m still not very used to it. Gnome Do takes up to 20MB of space but Launchy takes less than 7MB.

On the latest Launchy 2.1.1 released on this 6 Aug 08 has deb package version and platform independent version.

Link: SourceForge