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Open-source P2P Client 

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Music lovers must have heard about peer-to-peer clients such as Kaaza, LimeWire and Napster, which are used to share music, movies and pictures across the world. Essentially, P2P clients hook into common networks such as Overnet and FastTrack. This lets you share files with the rest of the world. There are oodles of P2P applications available for Windows, but unfortunately only a few for Linux and Mac. MLDonkey is an open-source multi-network multi-platform P2P client, which supports networks such as FastTrack, Overnet, BitTorrent, Gnutella and

Soulseek.

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Installation of MLDonkey clients for Linux



To use MLDonkey on your Linux machine, first download MLDonkey client from http://ftp.berlios.de/ pub/mldonkey/spiralvoice/. Make sure that you download the latest version (currently 2.5.30.5) from the Linux section. After the download completes, copy the downloaded file

'mldonkey-2.5-30.5.static.i386-Linux.tar.bz2' to the '/home' directory of your machine. Now open a terminal window and issue: 

# tar -jxvf mldonkey-2.5-30.5.static.i386-Linux.tar.bz2 

This command extracts the MLDonkey client to your /home directory. Now, from the same terminal window, issue the following command to start the MLDonkey client. 

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# cd /home/mldonkey-distrib-2.5-30-5



# ./mlnet 

Usage 



The 'mlnet' command you issued will run a daemon on your machine and this daemon can be managed by using both Telnet and a Web interface. It also has an option to install a GUI interface. This interface is installed separately. The Web interface is a convenient way of managing the MLDonkey. Let's see how to use it.

Open a Web browser and type in the URL http://127.0.0.1:4080. This will bring up the MLDonkey Web page, showing menus for Transfer, Search, Servers, Statistics, Option and Help. 

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Each of these menus has submenus to manage the features of each functions. For example, if you want to search for an MP3 file, click on the Search button and from its submenu, select 'Search MP3'. On the same Web page, you will be asked to fill in the keyword, artist, album and other information that you want to search with. Now click on Search. 

Direct Hit!
Applies to:

Linux home users 
USP: Share music, movies and pictures on the Internet using MLDonkey P2P clients
Links:

http://www.nongnu.org/mldonkey/ 

Then click on the 'Search Results' button on the same page to view the search results. The page displayed shows you a list of all MP3 files found against your search criteria. Just click on the files that you want to download. 

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This will queue your request on the P2P network. To check the status of a download, click on the 'Transfer' control button, and then click on the 'downloads' sub-item. This will show you the status list of your download. 

On further clicking on the files being downloaded, you will be shown all the sources they are being download from. Once the download is complete, the downloaded file is saved in '/home/mldonkey-distrib -2.5-30-5/incoming/file' folder. 

MLDonkey doesn't support simultaneous downloads like Kaaza and LimeWire. But the good thing about it is that it can hook onto multiple P2P networks. Of course be careful that you don't end up downloading or sharing illegal copies of software and music. The liability would be entirely yours. We, however, don't recommend the use of P2P software particularly on enterprise networks.

Sanjay Majumder

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