Tribler is a cross-platform, decentralized Bittorrent application which means it doesn't require any torrent website to find and download content. Another cool feature is that you can stream videos directly, without having to fully download them firstly (only with VLC 1.1.x for now). . Another cool feature is that you can stream videos directly, without having to fully download them firstly (only with VLC 1.1.x for now).

We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.

Tribler is not new, but a recent TorrentFreak article titled " Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down " made it a lot more popular than it used to be, causing the main page to be taken offline (the download page is still there).





The recent Tribler popularity also resulted in more frequent updates by its developers so I though I'd make a PPA so Ubuntu users can easily get updates without having to manually check for and download new versions. You don't have to use the PPA, as Tribler offers .deb packages for download, but you won't get any automatic updates.

Install Tribler in Ubuntu via PPA

The official Tribler .deb package comes with VLC as a dependency. Using the package in the PPA, VLC is not a strict dependency but just a recommended package so you're not forced to install VLC. VLC is used to stream videos but this feature only works with VLC 1.1.x (it didn't work with the latest VLC 2.0 in my test).





Also, even though the package on the official Tribler website is said to only work with Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, I've uploaded packages for all Ubuntu versions between 10.04 and 12.04. And because VLC 1.1.0 is not a dependency, the package installs just fine on older Ubuntu versions which don't have VLC 1.1.0 in the repositories. I've tested it on Ubuntu 10.04, 11.10 and 12.04 and Tribler seemed to work just fine, but if it doesn't work properly for you, there's not much I can do.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/tribler sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tribler