OLYMPIAN EXCHANGE

Kazaa [1], the popular Internetbased

file sharing network, has

the biggest user-base and offers

its users the widest range of services. So

far, Kazaa has owed its popularity to

Windows users – possibly due to the

prominence of illegal copies of expensive

software packages, which are useless

to most Linux users. Additionally,

Kazaa makes it difficult for the Linux

community to join the network, as the

peer-to-peer software Kazaa provides is

restricted to Microsoft operating systems.

The GiFT project [2] now has a Linuxbased

plugin for users who want to

share files worldwide via Kazaa. The

plugin implements the Fasttrack protocol

used by Kazaa and

additionally supports

the Gnutella [3] file

sharing network. At the

same time, OpenFasttrack

provides an alternative

to Kazaa. There

is another plugin for

the Ares network [4],

and the GiFT homepage

also refers to plugins

for Napster [5],

Soulseek [6] and EDonkey

[7], which are

incomplete or no

longer support the current

version. Box 1 describes how to add

plugins.