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I live in the Fortress of Solitude. I drive the Silver Beast. My obsession is justice. I used to be a Windows software developer. I retired in 2000 when my stock options helped me achieve financial security.

Friday, February 03, 2006

How to Get Started with Linux, Part IV

With the popularity of instant messaging and peer-to-peer file sharing, I would be remiss in not showing how to do these things under Linux. First, instant messaging. Under KDE, there is an application called Kopete ("Chat" under the Internet menu). Kopete can be easily configured to use the MSN Messenger protocol. In fact, I've done this in order to talk to my friends over MSN.

(There are other instant messaging programs available for Linux, such as Gaim, but Kopete is available under KDE, so why not use it?)

Peer-to-peer file sharing can be done by installing a program with a very odd name: KMLDonkey. First, go here and download the latest SUSE Linux binary version of KMLDonkey (currently, it's for version 9.2 of SUSE, but it'll work with version 10 as well), then click on the RPM file from within Konqueror and "Install Package with YaST."

KMLDonkey depends on another program called MLDonkey, which can be found here. Download the "Linux" i386 version of the file. This file will need to be "extracted to" a location of your choice.

Now, when you first start KMLDonkey, a Setup Wizard will walk you through the configuration process. You can ignore the Download MLDonkey page. You must select a Work Folder. Then you must Locate the MLDonkey Core file called "mlnet" which is in the extraction location that we mentioned earlier. Finally, it will ask you how you wish to start this core file. Choose either "Start the core when KMLDonkey starts" or "Start the core when you log into KDE." I choose the former because mlnet will only run when KMLDonkey runs; that's more efficient.

Now you can download all the MP3 music you want!


Other file sharing programs exist. A very popular one is LimeWire, which uses the Gnutella network. However, I chose KMLDonkey because it supports a variety of different file sharing networks. In other words, it's more flexible.

1 Comments:

Blogger Darkest Knight said...

There is an alternative to using the SUSE 9.x version of KMLDonkey with your SUSE Linux 10: Build KMLDonkey from the source code. Yes, this is as arcane as it sounds!

First, you have to install the required development libraries and header files using YaST's Software Management. These packages are:

qt3-devel
kdelibs3-devel

Then, you must download the KMLDonkey source package from here.

Open a Terminal session (command line window) and execute these commands:

tar jxvf kmldonkey-0.10.1.tar.bz2
cd kmldonkey-0.10.1
./configure --prefix=$(kde-config --prefix)
make
su -c "make install"

And you're done! KMLDonkey will appear in KDE's Internet menu. The above process may be arcane but it's fairly straightforward as I've presented it to you...and that's the point.

6:00 PM  

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