Best Guide To Download Torrents

Torrents have been the most important component whenever we think of getting content from the Net. But sometimes the content we download from torrent is not authentic and also it might contain virus and other non relevant stuff. So if you are going to download something , try to investigate about that torrent. By investigation it doesn't mean you need to dig out the secret information about the uploader or the file but basic know how before downloading a torrent can save your bandwidth and will give you better content. 

1. First thing is to know about the torrent client you want to use. My preference would be to go for the U torrent as it is the lightest one and no un-necessary messages to upgrade to pro version.

Here is the link to download that: www.utorrent.com/downloads‎

Other Good Torrent Clients which you should prefer are Windows:

Bit Torrent: http://www.bittorrent.com/downloads/win/
Flash Get: http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm
Lime Wire: http://www.limewire.com/download/releases

For Linux Bases System you can consider:

Transmission: Comes as default in Linux Machines


2. After you are done with the client you need to look for the torrent file which you want to download and some good authentic sites are below:

1.   Miniova, 
2.   The Pirate Bay ( Might be blocked by Some ISP's. Use BayMirror Instead)
3.   Torrentz ( Contains links to Multiple torrent Sites)
4.   extratorrent.com
5.   bitenova.nl
6.   fenopy.com
7.   torrentat.org
8.   fulldls.com
9.   spynova.org
10. 2torrents.com
11. scrapetorrent.com
12. litebay.org
13. torrents.to 

My personal favorite from all is The Pirate bay for many good reasons explained later.

3. So once you open the torrent site and you start looking for the torrent then you might consider the comments given on the quality of torrent and most of the time Pirate-bay has good reputation in that as they have good comments from people downloading there.

4. Who is the Up-loader ? Many times new fake Up-loader are trying to ruin the reputation of torrent quantity. Beware of them. Best Up-loaders are:

1. axxo
2. fxg
3. klaxxon
4. YIFY

And the quality of torrent they provide is perfect. Believe me, they spend lot of time and effort in creating good quality torrent. And Pirate-Bay has their torrent first most of the time. There are others also buy i rely on them and hence use their torrent for downloading.

5. How many Seeders are there for the torrent. Always look for the torrent file which has maximum seeders because it will help in downloading faster. Seeding keeps the torrent alive and Leechers ( Who just download but don't Upload) kill them.

6. And last but not the least and as everyone knows torrent is alive because of sharing. So give what you take. It means upload and download ratio should be 1:1 for a torrent to stay healthy. And if you have enough bandwidth, keep the torrent alive by seeding as much as you can.

Enjoy and please leave comments for more information.

Ubuntu TV : Open Source News

Another milestone achieved in Open Source with the launch of Ubuntu TV.  Its a Smart TV operating system developed by Canonical, based on the Ubuntu operating system and using the Unity 2D user interface built with the Qt application framework.

It is designed for the living-room TV using a remote control. Ubuntu TV likely to hit Indian shores next year Broadening the horizons of its open source operating system beyond the PC domain.

Canonical recently ventured into the television division with Ubuntu TV. The company had unveiled the first Ubuntu TV at CES in Las Vegas this year. Ubuntu TV is likely to reach users around early next year. The device will be launched in India around the same time, said Jane Silber, chief executive officer, Canonical.

Silber quoted that Ubuntu TV is using the same Ubuntu core and underlying platform (and similar Unity-based but not identical user experience) and bringing the same Ubuntu principles that we bring to the desktop to the TV. So the simplicity and the dynamics remain the same, which they think is needed in a smart TV. 


TVs are becoming computers these days. People now have computing power in their smart displays. I think we will see the same convergence that is happening in phones and desktops in the TVs too. People now download an operating system for their computers but, in future, they will do that for their TVs. We hope to see Ubuntu TVs shipping early next year. Ubuntu TVs should possibly ship in India around the same time as in other global markets.”

Ubuntu TV will be based on Ubuntu 12.04, is expected to have its own movie store, ability to record and play videos, DVD-Video and Blu-ray Disc support, touch-ready interface ability to integrate all standard terrestrial broadcast system and also satellite and cable services, ability to stream music, photos and videos from a PC to the TV and applications designed specifically for Ubuntu TV.

Basic Unix Shell Script: A Tutorial

Shell Scripting is underlying core of Unix Operating System and if you haven't experienced the beauty of command line or shell interface of Unix while using that OS then you haven't seen Unix at all. Unix Shell Script can make your task much easier and fun at the same time as you can modify the way you want it to and you don't have to depend upon particular software do that work for you.

Why do we need a Shell Script for. You have a set of commands which you want your computer to perform and since you don't want to type one by one you combine all the commands in a Single file and you call it a script file and when you run it, Unix shell will run those commands in Sequence. Well it is just a basic to understand the Shell Script in Simple terms. But There are great things that Shell scripting can do and my aim is to make it fun while understanding it so that we will picture it easily in our mind. 


I'll try to write in a way so that any Layman can get it. It feels bad to see people stuck to old Windows system though I don't deny the User friendliness of Windows(because we have been using them from long), but one should try working on Linux or Unix System once and then you'll see the real beauty and power of using Open Source Technologies. If you are quite new to Unix System and just trying learn the Shell Scripting and you have Windows system installed, don't worry, you don't have to format your Windows to install Unix. Just install Virtual Box in your system  which you can get it from here, and install the Guest operating system of your choice.

You need to do the Following:

1.	Install Virtual Box Software ( Its Free and Pretty Good)
2.	Download Unix or Linux Flavor like Ubuntu,Fedora or Suse etc.. as per your choice(For a starter I would suggest installing Ubuntu.)You can get it from here
3.	Install the Guest Operating System in your Virtual Box.

You also have a Choice to use the Windows based Unix Shell Script software to run the commands but i would suggest to install the Linux OS and enjoy it.


A basic introduction to Unix Shell before starting with Shell scripting is that a Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or in easier way its like a Language interpreter which you need when you don't understand any Language. So Shell helps interpreting our language to a Language which Computer understand and work as we command. There are many Shells available in Unix and if you want to go in depth about them you can get it here . 

We will use the basic terminal to run our shell script and if you want to know a bit about installing some software's in Ubuntu you can check it Here


Ok, lets start discussing scripting right away and we can talk about the commands used in the script on the way. Let's say you login into your Unix Machine and you want to check that how many people are logged in today. We will use different commands for that like who, date:

who: This Shell command tells us how many people are currently logged in. (Just For your Information, Unix is a Multi User Operating system so multiple users can be there at a time and if you are an administrator you may want to check who is currently logged in). The Output of this command is something like this   

pc       pts/0        2012-07-07 23:04 (:0)

Where:

pc:	User name of the person Logged in.
pts/0:	The Terminal Name of the User from where he is logged into the Shell.
2012-07-07 23:04	Date of Login and the Time When User Logged in.
(:0)	Terminal from where he is logged(Could be a Remote Machine Also)

Unix uses a system of Pipe where and Output of one Shell command can be used as an Input for other Shell command. You can compare it with multiple Garden Hose pipes tied to each other in a way lie water coming out from one end is entering the other hose pipe. How you want to use that output depends upon you. Like in the above case we need a total count of people logged in and so we apply pipe to our who command like this :

who | wc -l

Where :  wc: Word Count and since we want to count the lines as each line tells us the user logged in so we use and option of word count i.e. -l .

Unix shell give us another beautiful feature of using the options to further tweak the output we want to see. The point is, we need a direct answer to our question rather than all the options which a Unix command is giving us and so we use options and filters etc. And when you run the above command in terminal you'll see the output as number( Number of Users logged into you system) So in above case it will be 1.

Other Shell Command we will use is:

date: It's quite clear from the name itself what it will display and its output without any filter looks like this:

Sun Jul  8 09:06:19 IST 2012

Now lets combine the above two shell command and put them in a script file so that you don't have to run them individually. We will create the file first and you can create that through Unix Shell itself using cat command. Its executed as:
 cat > <file name>   


Name the file whatever you want and run the command like:

cat > MyFirstShellScrpit.sh

I have put .sh in the end for my understanding that its a shell scrpit file. You can choose not to put that extension but i suggest you should do it for future easy reference. After running the above command you will see that terminal is just showing a blinking cursor which means its waiting for you to add the contents to the file you just created. So we will enter the commands we discussed earlier and its like this :

cat > MyFirstShellScrpit.sh

who | wc - l

date

^d

 ^d is used in Unix Shell to tell that its the end of file and please go back to the prompt. And Bingo your first shell script file is saved and ready to run. But before running a shell script we need to make it executable also like we have and .exe or .bat file in windows. So type in Terminal

chmod +x MyFirstShellScrpit.sh

Where : chmod is a Unix command which tells to change the mode of the file. There are three modes of a file which are read, write and Execute written as r, w, x and + means that I want to add this mode to the file( so - means remove that mode). So the above file will make it executable. We can run our shell script now. And we run it as:

./MyFirstShellScrpit.sh

 And the output should be:

1

Sun Jul8 09:06:19 IST 2012

 Congratulations. You have just run your first shell script. So every time you feel like checking how many users are currently logged in, just run the script and bingo, count of people with date will be there on your screen. 


Lets do one thing more to make this script more useful. You want to track the total number of logins on that day for a particular month so its better to save it in a file also. So we do something like this:

./MyFirstShellScrpit.sh > data.txt

 (Where > operator will send the output of the shell script to the file data.txt and if that file doesn't exist , it will create it automatically)

You just need to be a bit cautious with it because if the above file exist already it will overwrite all the contents without giving any warning.

So how to keep adding the data everyday. For that we use the shell script as:

./MyFirstShellScrpit.sh >> data.txt

Where >> means that append my output to the previous output which is there. So check the file data.txt after a some days you will see something like this:

1
Sun Jul  8 09:06:15 IST 2012
5
Sun Jul  9 09:07:19 IST 2012
4
Sun Jul  10 09:07:19 IST 2012

The output will vary as per number of users logged in at the time you checked. So its like you want to track how many people were in office at around 9 a.m. logged in, this basic command will do the purpose.

This is just the basic and you could see the beauty of simple shell script.

Open Source: Human Knowledge is for the World

Unix,Linux,Red Hat:

Sounds like a very familiar term. Is it ? Heard about it in magazines, news and from people ? People say, I don't see and real significance of this word in my area. Well, it might mean nothing to us, but it means everything for people who are working day and night making software's to help the Open Source Community, so that the monopoly of Proprietary software can end.

So what exactly is Open Source: To understand in a layman's term, Lets understand this with a Simple example:

You have a bike or a Car and after few days you got some technical problem and the bike broke down. Now the problem is that spare parts required to repair the bike are only available with One Service Center and your bike can be repaired at that place only. You are suppose to take your bike at any service center as per your choice and get it repaired there. But the manufacturer is not giving the spare part to any other service center and hence no one can repair it. And now they can charge you what ever they like , since they are the owners of that spare part. Ain't that bad? Its a monopoly by force. How would you feel ? You want the spare part to be available to all and any person or service center can use it and repair your Vehicle.

And in software terms, its like giving the Source code along with the software that a organization is selling to the client. A bit weird for you, no? I mean, you can argue that why would someone will share it recipe along with the dish. But the Open Source Community believes that it should be shared because, you are not alone the owner of this recipe. Its an idea created by millions of software developers, which an organization use for its own business and earn from it and the real developer gets only small percent of share in the name of Salary or remuneration. They need to be given their due equally and that's why Open Source believes the Source needs to be shared.

We can take a note here that Open Source doesn't mean its free. As the saying goes: "There is Nothing Called Free Lunch". And Open Source supports it properly. You can charge whatever you want and if your stuff is good, people will pay it , but you are suppose to share the code also as if i want to upgrade it future, you can have someone else to do it or you can go back to them,if they are best in it.


And that's what organizations, which believe in Open Source Concept, do. They make a Software, either they put it for free or lets say they sell it to you or some other organization at some cost(cost of making a software for your organization) and they also give you the source code along with it , so that you can change it or enhance it or you can give it to some other vendor to enhance it , who you might fell can do better customization. So its a win-win for all. You are getting better stuff and you are free to getting it done by any Vendor whom you feel is competent enough to give you a better quality software. You can get it repaired your self also and you need not to be dependent upon the same vendor to repair it for you who are only waiting for such situation to arise.

I hope it clear it. Let me know your comments on the same.