Transmission is a lightweight Bittorrent Client comes by default with Ubuntu. While Canonical only provides critical updates, here I’ll show you how to install / upgrade the latest Transmission in Ubuntu via its PPA. Supports Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise and Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal.

UPDATE 2024: The tutorial is outdated! If you’re looking for most recent Transmission PPA, see this one instead.

At the moment of writing this tutorial, the latest release is Transmission 2.8.2. It brings a lot of bug fixes and a few improvements.

• Fix webseed crash
• Fix crash when adding UDP trackers whose host’s canonical name couldn’t be found
• Fix crash when sending handshakes to some peers immediately after adding a magnet link
• Fix crash when parsing incoming encrypted handshakes when the user is removing the related torrent
• Add safeguard to prevent zombie processes after running a script when a torrent finishes downloading
• Fix “bad file descriptor” error
• Queued torrents no longer show up as paused after exiting & restarting
• Fix 2.81 compilation error on OpenBSD
• Don’t misidentify Tixati as BitTornado?
• Fix bug that had slow download speeds until editing preferences for Mac Client
• Fix crash that occurred in some cases after using Torrent > Set Location
• Fix crash where on_app_exit() got called twice in a row
• Fix 2.81 compilation error on older versions of glib
• Can now open folders that have a ‘#’ in their names
• Silence gobject warning when updating a blocklist from URL
• Add Qt5 support

To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, run below command to add the Bittorrent PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa

After that, run blow command to install Bittorrent. Or use Synaptic Package Manager to upgrade the package.

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install transmission

That’s it. Enjoy!