Gift

From http://gift.sourceforge.net/about.mhtml:

"GiFT is a collection of various software components geared towards improving the overall usability of a multitude of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. This goal is accomplished by unifying the components such that a user of the software may choose any of the available interfaces to access any of the available networks. The central application, giftd, uses a plugin-based architecture capable of using multiple networks simultaneously through a single user interface."

Installation

Install GiFT, plugins, and GUI (optional).

# pacman -S gift gift-fasttrack gift-gnutella gift-openft

The GUI's are all Arch packages: Giftoxic (Gtk), Apollon (Qt), and Giftcurs (console).

# pacman -S giftoxic
# pacman -S apollon
# pacman -S giftcurs

If you find no errors, gift should have been properly installed. If you want Ares, I believe the only for Arch is to compile it from source. Anyone else know a pkg for it, lemme know.

Configuration

1. Run

   $ gift-setup

   as a normal user, and if there are multiple users this has to be done multiple times - one by each user.
2. The program will run a bunch of questions and they all really do not matter except the Plugin one (easily the most important) and some of the ports should correspond.
3. Once you get to the port question enter this and exactly this:

   Gnutella:FastTrack:OpenFT

   If that has been done illegally, it won't work.
4. GiFT should now work and it's time to start out GiFT GUI/CLI:
   • For Apollon, run

     apollon

     and if that fails to connect, try running

     giftd

     to get GiFT running first.
   • For Giftoxic, simply run

     toxic

     and it will execute both giftd and giftoxic
   • For giftcurs, simply run

     rungift

     and it will execute both giftd and giftoxic.

And, there you have it. If everything was done properly you should have GiFT connecting. There have been some problems with Fasttrack and all that, but you will have to read up because I dunno them.

Troubleshooting

If you run into this error:

$ giftd
*** ERROR: Your setup is incomplete ***

You will need to run gift-setup and be sure that you read absolutely every configuration option (no, really). Some default configuration values are considered illegal, and will raise this error message. If you suspect that you have configured giFT properly, consult the conf files in /home/joe/.giFT/ for diagnostic purposes.

If you are still having problems you should consult the QUICKSTART guide available from the standard giFT distribution.

Then it means you didn't read the gift-setup instructions properly. And it can be easily fixed by the first question to not equal zero, I believe.

External resources

• For any questions, e-mail at dauoalagio@gmail.com