BitTornado Redux
Thanks to everyone who wrote in expressing their thoughts on yesterday’s BitTorrent Client Shootout. The article occupied the top slot on the frontdoor of Digg.com for the better part of yesterday evening and this morning, so we got a big pile of reader feedback.
One of the sticking points for several readers was the discussion of BitTornado. I docked BitTornado in the review, listing the absence of a Mac and *Nix client as one of the major disadvantages. I read the documentation on the BitTornado site and found that the builds offered for download don’t have GUIs and aren’t packaged with python.
As it turns out, the Mac and *Nix builds on the BitTornado site work just fine on BSD and Linux boxen without compiling — from the command line. You just need to unzip the application and type:
cd Bittornado-CVS; python ./btdownloadgui.py whatever.torrentIt’s still a disadvantage to have to run the client from the command line, as such things are beyond 90% of the general public. But this does warrant an explanation, so I thank the several readers who pointed it out.
Many people also offered some alternative clients for the Mac and Unix/Linux. I will post those suggestions along with some of the more colorful reader emails in very near future.
