BitTorrent is a downloading technology that sometimes gets a bad press because it is misused by software pirates.

However, it remains an efficient and ingenious method of software distribution which is used by many reputable software publishers including Sun Microsystems for its OpenOffice suite.

BitTorrent is also popular as a way of distributing the many flavours of the Linux operating system, because it involves very little expense on the distributor's part, which is important when giving away software for nothing!

In the Workshops section of issue 224 of Computeractive we walk through the process of installing and configuring the necessary software to use BitTorrent, and also show how to use this software to download OpenOffice.

So refer to the magazine and then click to be transferred to the µTorrent download page.