Downloading Raspbian with the Torrent Link

For the last two releases I’ve had trouble with browser (HTTP) downloads of Raspbian failing. I sort-of guess it’s because of heavy server loads due to the change of major release from Stretch to Buster. I’m trying to make 50 microSD cards by Monday because of two more workshops Tuesday and Wednesday and the failed downloads frusticated me!

I installed qBittorrent, and the torrent download was fast and smooth. Highly recommended, and qBittorrent is available for Windows and MacOS. You can install it on Raspbian with sudo apt-get install qbittorrent . Source code is available, so you could build it for any OS.

This is so cool that I have a couple of requests of you if you do this.

  1. Send the maintainers some money, even if it’s only one dollar or one pound; you can do it with PayPal.
  2. After your download is complete, leave the qBittorrent client running for several hours to share some of your bandwidth with others. How long? Perhaps until the number of bytes uploaded is greater than the number downloaded. If you wanted to be really generous, you could leave the “seeding” operation running continuously on a Pi stuck in a corner somewhere.

{time passes} OK… I have that “Pi in a corner” contributing a few K bytes per second to the Raspbian torrent. (At home… I’d probably get my fingers spanked if I did it at the university.)