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Now that I set up a 1TB Ubuntu box I needed to get Azureus 3.x running on it. It turns out this is vastly harder than it should be.

My initial attempt was what all the docs say to do: sudo apt-get install azureus. After all, this is Ubuntu, the distro that will replace Windows with a free, stable, usable OS built on the principles of freedom, openness, viral licenses, and communism. Sadly, if you go this route, you’ll learn first hand the fruits of a proletariat state, in the form of starvation, torture, and ultimately, execution by inexplicable compatibility problem.

As far as I can tell, there are a few problems with the azureus package:

• It’s based on Azureus 2.5, which is the version your great grandfather used to download silent films during the Civil war
• It installs Azureus as root (which is fine), but runs it as non-root (which is fine). This is all fine, until Azureus goes to update itself to the new Horseless Carriage version (see bullet above), when it discovers it’s running as an unprivileged user and thus lacks the privs to update its own binaries
• Last but certainly not least, somewhere in the Ubuntu package dependency chain there lives the guy whose job it is to decide which Java package the azureus package depends on. Unfortunately for you, this guy is a Pinko agent, so he decides to use [gcj](http://gcc.gnu.org/java/), which is the GNU clean room version of Java, licensed under the GPL (of course). This is a great idea, since Sun’s fascist license is only free as in beer and the GPL is free as in love.

  Much like Marxist economics, this looks absolutely fantastic on paper. In another startling parallel to Marxism, this is catastrophic in practice. Maybe, years from now, GCJ will be just as good as Sun’s Java, and we can all use GPL’d code while we take our children to throw rotten fruit at the capitalists in the stocks in the village square. However, today it blows since Azureus and the major Azureus plugins like AzSMRC and SafePeer range from flaky to explosive when run under GCJ.

After some fruitless Googling I came to the conclusion I should just download Azureus from Sourceforge and install it myself. So, I installed the sun-java6-jre package to get a real man’s Java implemenation, I grabbed the Azureus tarball and extracted it to /opt/azureus/, then fired it up. Then, to what did my wondering eyes appear, but meaningless error messages about a missing libswt-gtk or whatever.

You see, it turns out the latest Azureus ships with a version of SWT that depends upon GTK 3.3, but Feisty installs 3.2. I had to copy the contents of /usr/lib/java and /usr/lib/jni and /usr/lib/ecplise/plugins to /opt/azureus to get Azureus to start. Then it downloaded the latest SWT update (apparently this is more recent than what’s in the tarball, for reasons I don’t understand), and once it had this updated swt.jar, it was no longer dependent upon the other crap I copied in, so I was able to delete it.

I also had to make sure my non-privileged user owned the /opt/azureus folder and its contents, so updates could run successfully.

Now, Azureus is running fine. If only I could find a Linux alternative to PeerGuardian 2 that doesn’t suck (SafePeer was written by a 12 year old and shows no sign of ongoing maintenance, and MoBlock is a lame static solution with no provision to updating its blocklists).

Tags: azureus, feisty, java, Migrated from Drupal, tech diary, ubuntu

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Migrated from Drupal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.