MLDonkey is a multi-platform and freely distributed eDonkey client, a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file-sharing application. It provides users with both a server (daemon) and graphical user interface (GUI).
It seems to be the first ever open source application that could access the eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing network, as a eDonkey2000 clone. It officially supports the Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, MorphOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Currently, the application supports several large P2P networks, including Overnet, BitTorrent, Fasttrack (Kazaa, Imesh, Grobster), Gnutella (Bearshare, Limewire, etc), Gnutella2 (Shareaza), Soulseek, Opennap, and Direct-Connect (DC++).
Several user interfaces are available for this project, including web-based, native GUIs, Telnet based and basic Wap front-ends. The most simple and effective appears to be the Telnet interface accessible through the command-line (telnet 127.0.0.1 4000) or via the Putty application.
While the Wap interface is extremely simple and provides users only with very basic functionality, such as current download and upload speed, current running downloads, as well as pause, resume, and cancel functions, the web-based interface can be easily accessed with any modern web browser through http://admin@127.0.0.1:4080.
MLdonkey comes by default with a GTK interface. However, there are many open source or commercial GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) front-ends available, including Sancho, KMLdonkey, G2Gui, CocoDonkey, xDonkey, mlMac, Nulu GUI ML, MLdonkeyWatch, phpEselGui, saman, Platero, Alemula, Zuul, JMoule, Web-GMUI, and Rmldonkey.
All the aforementioned MLdonkey interfaces can be used both remotely and locally. Furthermore, it allows users to easily enable or disable P2P networks, perform parallel searches on all enabled peer-to-peer networks, as well as to download files concurrently from multiple clients.
Summing up, MLdonkey is a very powerful and popular P2P client that runs on most operating systems, supports a wide range of peer-to-peer networks, and comes with a plethora of user interfaces.
Features:
- 100% Open Source, GPL license
- runs on Linux, Unix, Solaris, MacOSX, MorphOS and Windows
- The p2p core can run on a resource limited headless computer, with remote GUI clients accessing it over the network.
- The core is built to run as daemon for days, weeks, ever...
- Several different GUIs available, some of them developed separately.
- Multi-user support: the same core can queue and process downloads for several different users who can't see what the others are downloading.
- Several different file-sharing networks supported:
- ED2K (and Kademlia and Overnet)
- BitTorrent
- DC++
- (FastTrack, SoulSeek, Gnutella and G2 need work)
- The core can download the same file from several different networks simultaneously.
- Scriptable command-line interface available. It's possible to control all aspects of mldonkey from the CLI.
- Written in ObjectiveCaml, with some parts written in C and some in Assembly.
