While it's a better idea to allocate an static or fixed IP address to your Raspberry Pi, here is a simple trick to find the DHCP allocated IP address to your RasPi on a network. This specially come handy when you are trying to connect to RasPi remotely via SSH or VNC and don't know the dynamic IP it is currently active on.

While WICD network Manager is an excellent choice for configuring wireless networking with allocation of an fixed IP address, this can be achieved manually in Linux by editing the relevant \etc\network\interfaces file as shown below.

In my ongoing quest to get an free, lightweight and fast download manager with remote access ability for Raspberry Pi. I settled for Transmission to get torrent downloading and pyLoad for ftp/http downloading, however both of them have issues under limited resources of Raspberry Pi and had frequent crashes now and then.

After, a lot of research, tweaking and testing - I had finally found the best option for a perfect lightweight download manager on linux as "FatRat". Despite the name being FatRat, this open-source download manager for Linux is written in C++ and is slim on requirements, fast on performance and comes with all the bells and whistles one would need from an modern download manager including Segmented HTTP(S)/FTP downloads, FTP uploads, torrents and a super-fast web-ui for remote access.

pyLoad is an excellent cross-platform download manager with support for one-click file hosters, captcha decoding and excellent web-interface for anywhere remote control over internet.

After installing transmission torrent client on Raspberry Pi, pyLoad is an suitable choice to take of the other downloading needs like handling links from One-Click-hoster's, container formats like DLC, video sites or just plain http/ftp links. Here is an step-by-step guide to get pyLoad installed and working on Raspberry Pi.

BitTorrent is without a doubt the most popular file-sharing method out there, Peer-2-Peer (P2P) torrent downloading requires a computer which runs a torrent downloading client to fetch content from other users sharing it. Torrent downloading can be slow as speeds depends on swarm sharing the content, this means you need to have your computer powered-on consuming electricity. Luckily, we can now use our ultra-cheap Raspberry Pi to get the job done 24x7 - consuming just 5w of power.

After completing the basic setup of the Raspberry Pi, networking it to internet, attaching an external HDD and configuring it to work as an Network Attached Storage (NAS) we all all set to install the cross-platform Transmission Torrent Client of the RasPi to get our cheap seedbox working.

The Raspberry Pi software can be divided into three core components - the closed-source GPU firmware, the modified ARM Linux Kernel (which controls how the CPU is utilized) and the software installed by the user. The GPU firmware and Kernel are regularly updated by the RasPi core team to fine-tune stability and performance of the little computer. Here is a simple utility to download and install these firmware and kernel updates in an automatic, user-friendly manner.

Raspberry Pi does not feature an power on/off button, if it's receiving power it's ON and if not OFF. However, it is required to do a graceful shutdown or reboot as to prevent any operating-system corruption. Rebooting and Shutting down Raspberry Pi can easily be achieved by using "sudo reboot" (sudo if not using the root account) and "sudo shutdown -hP now" at the terminal. These commands can also be used over SSH terminal if you are running your RasPi headless (without a screen attached) or remotely over network.

In the last RasPi tutorial, we configured the device to have an static IP on the network. Now, its time to add an external storage to the Pi - in this tutorial we will be adding an removable 500 GB USB harddisk drive to our mini-computer and share it over network for wireless access using Samba server.

After completing internet connectivity setup on Raspberry Pi, it's time to setup a fixed/static IP so we can access it easily over a network via SSH and VNC.

To get this done we will be using another popular, simple to use, graphical WiFi Network management Utility for Linux - WICD Network Manager. Just follow the steps below to install and configure an static IP on your Pi.

After initial setup of the Raspberry Pi, it's time for an internet connection. While using Internet over Ethernet is just plug-n-play business on Raspberry Pi, setting-up an Wireless connection takes a little more effort.

To get started with WiFi, first we need to connect an supported USB WiFi dongle to the Pi. Make sure you are using an Powered USB Hub (shown in the picture below) as Raspberry Pi is not able to reliable power multiple USB devices, follow the instructions next to configure your WiFi dongle on the Pi.