Installing Transmission 2.33 on Debian 6 Squeeze

Installing Transmission became recently less easy for users like me with a headless Debian Squeeze server running quietly for months, because of the need of libevent 2.0.10 or greater.

checking for LIBEVENT... configure: error: Package requirements (libevent >= 2.0.10) were not met:

No package 'libevent' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables LIBEVENT_CFLAGS
and LIBEVENT_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

Here is what to do in order to change as little as possible your Debian server:

1. Connect to http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent/ and get the version you need:
   $ wget http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-2.0.12-stable.tar.gz
2. Use the following command to extract the archive:
   $ tar xzf libevent-2.0.12-stable.tar.gz
3. Enter the command to prepare the package:
   $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/libevent
4. The next command:
   # make
5. Login as root and enter this last command:
   # make install

Now you are able to proceed with the installation of Transmission. The way of doing things showed in a previous post is not valid anymore. Here is the new procedure in short version:

1. $ wget http://download.transmissionbt.com/files/transmission-2.33.tar.bz2
2. $ tar xvjf transmission-2.xx.tar.bz2
3. $ cd transmission-2.xx
4. $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/libevent/lib/pkgconfig ./configure
5. # /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon stop
6. # make
7. # make install
8. # /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start

Note that point 5 and 8 are only needed if you are upgrading from a previous version.

Special thanks to BaLP, my personal Linux guru, for helping solve the libevent problem by giving me detailed informations on how to resolve it.