File Sharing with Apollon and GiFT
OLYMPIAN EXCHANGE
The operators of the popular Internet-based file
sharing network, Kazaa, only provide software for
Windows systems, but the GiFT project brings
Kazaa support to Linux.
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.
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