Many people under Windows use uTorrent for downloading torrent files as it is one of the best clients in terms of features and functionality combined with it’s small size. And under Linux and Mac, at least at present, we don’t have uTorrent, though a Mac beta is currently in development and at times, uTorrent works under Wine. But the thing is, under Wine at least, uTorrent has had it’s own fair share of bugs I’ve encountered, such as it not starting or worse still, not able to install. While recently, a lot of the bugs have been ironed out, I’ll stick to Transmission for the time being, being a highly capable replacement for Linux. And today, I’m going to show you the only feature I missed when using uTorrent: the web interface.

Don’t get me wrong when I say Transmission has a web interface by assuming that on uTorrent there is none. Many people don’t use it for reasons I’m not quite sure, but I know myself I would be quite unhappy without them, because it helps me download some Linux ISOs faster then even the high speed connections I get at school. And when I say they are high speed, they were clocked at around 20mbps the last I checked: speeds only most of us can dream of. But of course, there are some distros that encourage users to download the torrents rather then using the direct links, due to the fact that they can be faster and you don’t need to use a download manager for them. Such examples would be Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. And as the case was pointed out on the forum, a torrent also offers stability when it comes to downloads. So how on Earth do we set up something so useful for us on the Linux machine?

Transmission Web Interface

Surprisingly enough, it’s not that hard. Open up the main client, then go to the Edit menu, then Preferences. Under the Web tab, simply check the Enable web client and set the port number to a safe port. I set mine to 9000, but that’s because I know nothing uses that, other good choices would be on anything above 1024 but below 49151, as not many programs use those ports. To prevent anyone else from accessing your now online Transmission client, you may also password protect it and even control which IPs can access your client, allowing for a wild card to be entered via an asterisk (*). All these options are simple to set as you can see below.

Overall, the setting up of the web client for Transmission is extremely easy and this will be able to help you control your downloads a little more. Like I said, I’ve personally used this to ease the server load on a Linux distribution’s site and considering how easy it is to set up, I’d recommend it for any other torrent downloaders. The only thing is, if you’re using a router or modem, you will have to set up port forwarding on it to allow for you to access your client while you’re out and about. Other then that, there shouldn’t be any problems whatsoever! I take no responsibility in what you download, so if you chose to break copyright law, that comes on your shoulders, not mine. And if you wish to use other features of Transmission, they have add-ons that are hosted on their main site. Happy downloading!