Under Windows one of my favorite software packages was cFosSpeed, a traffic shaping tool. It yields major performance improvements when, for example, having a video conversation while downloading a torrent in the background.
Is there an alternative for this under Ubuntu?
2 Answers
The Linux kernel itself has these capabilities, but for sure, it's not trivial to set up for people not familiar with these in-deep stuffs (using the command line oriented "tc" command which can manipulate the traffic control capabilities of the Linux kernel). I am not sure that you asks about an easy-to-use GUI, or you need only the theory. Maybe this helps:
It has at least a script, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel too much :)
2Wondershaper is powerful but has a bunch of pre-reading which it says is required in order to us it.
For somethig simpler, consider FireQOS:
FireQOS is a program which sets up traffic shaping from an easy-to-understand and flexible configuration file.
FireQOS is a traffic shaping helper. It has a very simple shell scripting language to express traffic shaping. You run FireQOS to setup the kernel commands. You can also run it to get status information or dump the traffic of a class. FireQOS is not a daemon and does not need to run always to apply traffic shaping.
There's also a tutorial for new users.
