Some of you might be familiar with an application called PeerBlock which is made specifically for Windows. You may also remember the older version called PeerGuardian which is also made by Phoenix Labs. Whatever the reason is for needing these types of applications, I thought it might be useful for the Linux beginners to know how to install and use this application.

Step 1

First and foremost, we need to somehow download this application to be able to use it. We have two possible places we can download from:
Debian at http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net
Ubuntu at Debian at http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net
Ubuntu at https://launchpad.net/~jre-phoenix/+archive/ppa

For sake of simplicity, we'll just download the files from sourceforge.

Step 2

Open Terminal (Control + Shift + I is a shortcut to opening terminal)
We need to install some additional libraries for us to actually easily package this software into something we can use.
Copy and paste the following into terminal and run each command.

sudo apt-get install devscripts debhelper po-debconf zlib1g-dev 
sudo apt-get install libnetfilter-queue-dev libnfnetlink-dev libdbus-1-dev libqt4-dev

Step 3

Extract the tarball archive so we can access the files inside of the folder:

tar xvfz pgl-2.1.3.tar.gz

Step 4

Navigate into the extracted directory:

cd pgl-2.1.3

Now we want to compile all of the files into deb packages so we can install them. Issue the following command inside the pgl-2.1.3 folder:

sudo debuild --no-lintian -us -uc -tc -b

Look within the containing directory (for me it was Downloads) and you will see the following deb packages created for us:

  • pglcmd_2.1.3-1_all.deb
  • pgld_2.1.3-1_*.deb
  • pgld-dbg_2.1.3-1_*.deb
  • pgl-gui_2.1.3-1_*.deb
  • pgl-gui-dbg_2.1.3-1_*.deb

Note: * should represent the architecture your CPU is. In my case, it's amd64 but for you it might be i386, x86_64, or something different.

Step 5

Now we finally get to utilize those newly created deb packages and bring the application to life!
Run the following commands in terminal:

sudo dpkg -i pgld_2.1.3-1_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i pglcmd_2.1.3-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i pgld-dbg_2.1.3-1_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i pgl-gui_2.1.3-1_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i pgl-gui-dbg_2.1.3-1_*.deb

Note: the wildcards (*) should work just fine for installing these packages. In the event they are not then replace them with the necessary text before .deb and after 2.1.3-1_

Once all of the deb packages have been install then you have PeerGuardian on your system! Hurray! We can run peerguardian by searching for it on our desktop (click the ubuntu home button for those with the default Unity DE) or we can start the application via the following:

# use this command for launching the GUI
sudo /usr/bin/pgl-gui
# use this command for the command-line application
sudo /usr/bin/pglcmd start
# ensure the application works correctly
sudo /usr/bin/pglcmd test
# we can also view stats on the applciation
sudo /usr/bin/pglcmd stats
# stop the application by running
sudo /usr/bin/pglcmd stop
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