Build Transmission from source

http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building

On Unix

Prerequisites

Ubuntu users: The packages you need are: build-essential automake autoconf libtool pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev intltool libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnotify-dev libglib2.0-dev. After you install those you can skip this section.

If this is your first time compiling on Unix, you'll need a few basic tools:

• gcc
• libtool
• gettext 0.14.1 or newer
• intltool 0.23 or newer

If you're planning to build from SVN:

• automake 1.9 or newer
• autoconf 2.54 or newer

Once you've got the basics out of the way, here are the libraries that Transmission needs to have in order to build:

• OpenSSL 0.9.8 or newer, preferably ssl or gnutls support.
• libcurl 7.16.3 or newer
• GTK+ 2.6 or newer (only needed by the GTK+ gui)
• libnotify 0.4.4 (optional, and only needed by the GTK+ gui)
• DBUS 0.70 (optional, and only needed by the GTK+ gui)

RPM users: you'll also need to install the corresponding -devel packages.

Building from a tarball

$ tar xvjf transmission-1.40.tar.bz2
$ cd transmission-1.40
$ ./configure -q && make -s
$ su (if necessary for the next line)
$ make install

Associate magnet links with Transmission in Firefox

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=308130
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol#Linux_and_Mac

1) Type about:config into the address bar and press Enter.
* Right-click -> New -> Boolean -> Name: network.protocol-handler.external.magnet -> Value -> true
* Right-click -> New -> String -> Name: network.protocol-handler.app.magnet -> Value -> /usr/local/bin/transmission
* Ensure network.protocol-handler.expose-all is set to true

edit: Turns out Transmission supports DHT but not magnet links yet. Maybe Transmission 1.8 will.