I just recently decided to move from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Fedora 20 for my home server. The hardware itself is a Dell Dimension 4400 about 12 years old now, but has worked as a server for the majority of this time. As a side note: interestingly I had a hefty struggle just to get the new OS installed, as none of the GUI’s in the standard Live media’s worked. After looking through the installation manual I found it was possible to run the installation remotely through VNC. This was using the network (netinst.iso) installation. And it actually worked flawlessly.

Software repositories are not very different comparing Fedora and Ubuntu. So to have the new OS as similar to the previous one, I wanted to have transmission-daemon up and running. At least Transmission is a very handy tool when large files has to be downloaded, and at least to aviod to tie up a laptop (on a wireless connection) doing this.

However, it took me quite some time to get this to work. I new a few workarounds existed for the Ubuntu installation, but this was all new kind of problems. So maybe this brief guide can help some others:

1. install transmission-daemon with using yum or whatever tool you like.
2. Enable and start the service:

   systemctl enable transmission-daemon

   The ‘enable’ makes the service startup at boot.

   systemctl start transmission-deamon

   Up to this point, there is not really any trace of the installation.

3. Files now appear in /usr/lib/transmission/, including settings files. I also wanted to run the process «as my own user», and have the config files and directories in my home folder. I did that by first stopping the service:

   systemctl stop transmission-daemon

4. and then edit the transmission-daemon.service file. (This is similar to the Ubuntu installation, where ‘user’ field also should be changed, though in a slightly different manner.) When the service is started again (similar to how it was started the first time), new folders will be created in you user .config directory.
5. Stop the service once more to make final changes to your settings file, as ports, RPC login, password, and so on. Many of these entries can be changed through the web interface later on.
6. Finally you can start the service again. You might have to make changes in your firewalld (use tool ‘system-config-firewall’), and/or SElinux (use tool ‘system-config-selinux’), to access the web interface properly through the ports set in the settings file.

That should be it 🙂 Hopefully it will work.

Edit 2014-05-26: in event of the package being updated, there is a risk that transmission-daemon.service file is replaced with the default one, and that the transmission-daemon service will not be started at all. To change this you would have to edit the .service file (i.e at /usr/lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service), change the «user=», and restart the service.