[ale] NewbieQ: How do I start using BitTorrent?

[johnmills at speakeasy.net (John Mills)]

ALErs -

My system is RH-7.3.

I want to capture Slackware ISO images and am not making much headway with
BitTorrent. I downloaded BitTorrent-3.2_cvs_alikins-2.noarch.rpm, created
the user 'btuser' in his/her own unique group (initially with a 'nologin'
shell, then on the second try with 'bash'), and associated
'application/x-bittorrent' and file extension 'torrent' with
'/usr/bin/btdownloadgui.py' in both '/etc/mailcap' and for a couple of
browsers.

I then went to [http://www.slackware.com] and tried to download the 'd1'
and 'd2' ISOs for slack-9.1. I saw a "progress" panel for a few seconds,
then it went away. What I got were a couple of binary files about 50KBy
long with the extension 'torrent'.

What should have happened? How do I start using this tool?

TIA.
 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu