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Dolda Connect is a client program for the Direct Connect peer-to-peer filesharing network, written for GNU/Linux systems. It is possible that it may run on other Unix systems as well, as long as it is compiled with GCC, but this is untested so far. It is licensed under the GPL, version 2 or later. Although it has not been an explicit goal, Dolda Connect seems to be rather portable, and appears to work on at least i386, x86_64 and SPARC.
It consists of two parts - the client daemon and the user interface. The daemon is what does all the job of sharing files, searching, connecting to hubs, etc., while the user interface is a simple program that connects to the daemon in order to control it and give the user the current status of the daemon (such as the file transfers currently in progress, etc.). These two program run independently of each other, and the user interface can therefore be made to connect to a daemon running on another computer, over the internet or otherwise. For the average user, this yields two primary advantages:
This architecture also has many other advantages in store for the more advanced users; since the user interface communicates with the daemon using a well-defined protocol, other user interfaces can be written, such as an automatic downloader, a chatbot, etc. It is also designed for secure multiuser operation.
As of this time, the main user interface program is written using GTK2. Currently, a Gaim plugin for chatting on DC hubs and a GNOME applet for monitoring transfers are in experimental (but mostly working) status. Screenshots of them all are available below:
A Guile extension module has been written for Dolda Connect, enabling programmers to easily build small (or large) utility programs for doing Dolda Connect tasks conveniently. For an example, check out this small program for handling the dchub:// URL notation. More examples are in the source code tree.
Since 0.3, there is also a Python module for Dolda Connect. It is distributed seperately from the main Dolda Connect source tree, since Python modules are best built with Python's distutils, which I am yet to be able to integrate with Automake (which is used to build the rest of Dolda Connect) in a useful way. Check out the Python version of the above mentioned Scheme example.
While still incomplete, documentation of Dolda Connect is improving with every release. First of all, there is a FAQ page. Unlike many other FAQs, it really is an actual FAQ page, where I put questions that I have been asked more than once. As such, you actually may be helped by looking at it.
All the rest of the documentation is available in the source tree, both as manpages that are installed with the system, and as a number of other text files, describing various parts of Dolda Connect. Those text files are also available here on the web page.
Dolda Connect is installable as an autopackage. See the installation instructions if you are unsure of how it works.
The latest release is Dolda Connect 1.3. Download it here.
The latest release of the Python module is 1.1r1. Download it here.
To see what has changed since the last version, see the ChangeLog. It may be worth noting that the ChangeLog lists only the major enhancements of the release, and there is almost always a number of minor fixes besides.
The latest code is available through GIT. It used to be available
through Subversion, but that has been deprecated in favor of Git. The
GIT URL is git://git.dolda2000.com/doldaconnect. The
snapshots usually compile and work.
Thanks to Gitweb, always up-to-date tarball snapshots can be fetched easily. Pick your choice:
The Gitweb interface is available here.
This site attempts not to be broken.