sproif.com

Everybody wants to be able to download a file at the spur of the moment.  Mininova.org just made it a ton easier to set it up to be completely automatic.  They call it Bookmarking and Remote Downloading.  I’m going to detail my current setup.

WARNING!!!

I’m assuming you’re going to use this for indie/underground music.  This is in NO WAY TO EVER BE USED TO DOWNLOAD LICENSED OR ILLEGAL MATERIALS.  You’ve been warned….

That’s right, it’s so important, that I used the <blink> tag… *shudder…

Setup
For clarity, let’s call my two machines “home” and “remote”.  “Home” is an ubuntu box in my home office.  “Remote” can be any web browser, for example, my laptop at work.

Registration
For this example, go to www.mininova.org and sign up for an account.  Once you are logged in, in the top right, point at your username, and select My Bookmarks.  You will need this RSS URL during installation.

Installation

1. I’m using KTorrent on my home machine.  Install that by opening a terminal and typing:

   sudo apt-get install ktorrent

2. Set it up to auto-launch when the system boots by
   1. Go to System > Preferences > Sessions
   2. Click Add
   3. Name: KTorrent
   4. Command: ktorrent
   5. Comment: <whatever you want>
3. Run ktorrent by either clicking Applications > Internet > KTorrent, type ktorrent at the command line, or reboot your machine.
4. Click on Settings > Configure KTorrent
5. Select Plugins
   1. Click on RSS Feeds and click the Load button in the top right.
   2. [OPTIONAL] You may want to enable/configure Bandwidth Scheduler as well to not piss off people in on your “Home” machine’s connection from slowing it down during heavy use hours, but that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
   3. ClickApply and OK to exit the window.
6. Back in the Application, you should now see a RSS Feeds tab, click that.  On that tab [Figure 1 Below]:
   1. Click New in the bottom left to add a new feed.
   2. Name it whatever you want.
   3. Copy/Paste the RSS Feed URL you got from your Mininova.org site into the URL line.
   4. Change Keep Articles (days) to something smaller, like 7 days
   5. Click Ignore TTL and enter something more reasonable like 10 minutes (it is in the format HH:MM:SS)
   6. Click the Active checkbox in the top left.
   7. Set up the AutoDownload Filter [Figure 2 Below].
      1. In the top left of the RSS tab, click the tab that says Filters*.
      2. Under Accept Filters, click New
      3. Type in a title
      4. Under Regular Expressions, type .*    (period asterisk, no spaces before, after, or in-between) and click Add
      5. In the top right, click the Active Checkbox.

Figure 1	Figure 2

* NOTE: Since you are setting up a personal RSS feed, I am assuming you want to download everything you mark for download. This Filter tool is very powerful.  You are able to watch the rss feed on any torrent site and filter out things that you want to download automatically such as episodes, new albums by bands, etc.  A handy tool to generate the regular expressions needed for the Filters page is called kregexpeditor and can be installed with apt-get.

Testing
Go to www.mininova.org and log in.  Search for anything you’re looking for, click on it, and at the top of the page you should see a button under the Download this Torrent link to Add to Bookmarks.  Clicking it adds this torrent to your RSS feed.  Your home machine will refresh your rss feed (at the period you set the TTL to, 10 minutes in this example) and mark that file for auto downloading.

Final Notes
I just got this working and I was rather excited to see how well it worked right off the bat.  I’ll edit/update this article as I find problems/fixes.

So, I’m still chillin here with my ubuntu install.  It’s going pretty swell..  My quest/quandary now is to find some kind of “Mac OSX-type dock” for Ubuntu.  I’ve installed Avant Window Navigator but found it to be too finicky/buggy/picky for my tastes.  Today I tried to install kiba-dock, but Ubuntu hated it.  It threw up at the sight of the the automake…  Then I tried the Simple Install Script, which is nice and everything, but it throws up in the same spot.  This is the error I get when it tries to install akamaru:

checking for intltool…
found intltool
checking for libtoolize…
found libtoolize
checking for automake…
found automake
checking for autoconf…
found autoconf
Running ‘autoreconf -v –install’…
autoreconf: Entering directory `.’
autoreconf: configure.in: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal –output=aclocal.m4t
aclocal: configure.in: 28: macro `AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT’ not found in library
autoreconf: aclocal failed with exit status: 1

Any ideas/suggestions would be fantastic..

Ok, I’m back, and the penguin and I are going head to head again.

I still want to make the change over to Linux full time, but I just keep reverting to Windows due to the familiarity.  But not anymore.  I’ve instituted a “no windows in my house” rule.  So, while my machine is still dual boot, I refuse to go back into vista business.

So, I’m adjusting.  I wiped my linux partition and did a fresh install of Hardy Heron.  No complaints there.  I’ve gotten Zend Studio for Eclipse installed, so my PHP coding questions are covered…  Thunderbird takes care of my imap mail accounts and Firefox for my web broswing needs…  Then there’s Pidgin for IM.

So, again, the only thing I’m missing so far is NaviCat for remote mySQL connections (via http tunneling, wicked handy), but I might just have to suck it up and purchase a license for Linux.  I’ve tried installing via Wine, but the http tunneling feature doesn’t work, probably because it relies heavily on the windows network layer for communication.  I’ll have to research that some more.  So, so far, so good.

As always, I’ll keep you posted.