Ubuntu: Up and Running

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

In case you haven’t come across them yet, peer-to-peer (P2P) programs are ones that allow computers all over the world to connect with each other and exchange files.

With P2P you can add a data file to your local file-sharing client (known as seeding), and its details will then be passed to the tracker servers that you choose. Using these servers, other users can then discover the file and start to download it from you.

If more than one user wants the file, they will all fetch different parts of it from your computer and then exchange the various pieces they get with each other, which means you don’t have to serve up the entire file for every downloader—keeping your bandwidth usage to the minimum.

Note

When large files such as the Ubuntu operating system ISO images are released, rather than consuming all of the available bandwidth at http://ubuntu.com, they are also listed on file-sharing trackers so that the images can be downloaded using P2P clients that share the required bandwidth between all downloaders (because they are also all uploaders, too).

Probably one of the best-known P2P file-sharing programs is BitTorrent, which you can access by selecting Applications → Internet → Transmission BitTorrent Client. But the most common way to call it up is by clicking a link to a torrent file.

The easiest way to find torrents is to use a search engine with a query that includes the word “torrent.” When you have located one that you want, click it and your browser ...