
Installation is simple, but running it at full capacity requires opening about half a dozen ports in your firewall and forwarding them to your computer if you happen to be behind a router. The simplest one to get started with is aMule. To access the network from a Linux client, you have a couple of choices. The list of available servers changes frequently, since anybody can become a server by running the appropriate software on a machine connected to the Web, so client programs usually must download server lists. The servers store information about available files and act as communications centers, but the data itself resides on the client nodes. The eDonkey2000 (eD2k) network is a server-based, P2P, file-sharing network that primarily contains music files, video files, text files, and software. Here are some desktop applications that allow you to become a full-fledged file sharer.

Taking into account how many clients are available for each, the current top three peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are eDonkey2000, FastTrack (derived from Kazaa), and Gnutella.


You can find Linux clients for several file-sharing networks.
