16 September 2000 ShyGuy likes to describe himself as the "Dark Loner Genius in the Corner" In reality, he is a technician plus salesman plus web designer at DSE Computers If you have a comment about the content of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums. |  |
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## FURI What is FURI? According to the website, it is "A Gnutella compatible, distributed file sharing system for all platforms." What does that mean, you may ask? Basically, FURI is a java based Gnutella clone (Gnutella is like Napster except you can share all kinds of files.) I've tried gnutella via the wonders of odin, but I like FURI much better. There is no getting around it, the primary use of programs like Napster is to download mp3 files that you don't own. I don't advocate you use FURI for pirating mp3 files or any other media, So, I just wanted to list a view legit uses just so you don't think I am some "w4rez d00d" who is dragging down the quality of this fine publication. 1. Downloading a digital copy of a file you already own. Transferring your audio cds to mp3 files complete with the ID3 tags filled out can be a long painful process, and just grabbing a copy off the internet saves a lot of time. Okay, I know the legality of this is very questionable, but many people consider this morally okay if they own a legal copy of the music (no flames please!). 2. Shareware/Freeware. Ever wanted to get the latest program for Nifty DoorWays 2001© to try with Odin, but the author's website was way too slow for your cable modem? You can use FURI to find a faster place to download the puppy. 3. Other Forms of media. every so often a movie file of some sort becomes all the rage for people to download. Remember the Dancing Baby? or Super Friends Wazzup? FURI is a good place to find this sort of thing. 4. FURI also has use as a serious file sharing program between people doing things like Open Source projects. It even has an IRC client built in so you can coordinate the project. More on the IRC later in this article. Anyway, enough of the computer politics, lets start looking at the program and how to make it work on your OS/2 machine.
First off, FURI is a java program you will need java 1.1.8 (or better) installed on your OS/2 system. get the latest copy plus patches at Duane Chamblee's Latest Warp 4 Updates page, But don't stop there! FURI also uses SWING RUNTIME from IBM. After you have these installed, go get FURI from the program's homepage. Unzip the archive to it's own directory and now it's time to create a .cmd file. Bring up OS/2 System editor, or your favorite Warp text editor, and type in the following line:
    java -classpath x:\furi\furi.jar;%classpath% furi.f
Where x: is your hard drive and \furi is the directory where you extracted the zip. save the file and create a program object called FURI and give it the ICON of your choice. (Quick Tip: open the FURI program object properties and click on the session tab. Check start minimized so you won't have to see the OS/2 command window pop up) Also make sure that x:\JAVA11\lib\classes.zip is in your classpath statement in the config.sys. Thanks to the people in the #voice channel on webbnet IRC, I would never have figured out how to make furi run without their help. Give it a second or two after double clicking the icon and then you should see this splash screen. Kinda pretty, huh? After FURI comes up, You will be presented with the main interface, it is divided into 7 sections. The first tab on the top is Gnutella Net and it displays the main stats on the network, including how many connections you have and a field to type in a server address. Second tab is the search section where you type in keywords for your queries and get the results. Third tab is the Monitor Search section which display a constant stream of search strings from other people connected to the Gnutella Net (Warning: a large number of the search words are from people looking for porn, so you probably want to keep this section away from the kids. The fourth tab is for Downloads, displaying what files you're downloading. FURI has a cool feature that allows you to pause a download and resume it later, nice for those of us still using POTS connections. Fifth is Share where you keep track of the files you are sharing and who is uploading what from your PC. Sixth tab is Chat (Deprecated) Whatever that means, (yes I know what deprecated means, oh never mind) Not much happens on this one, I think it is used for non-IRC chat. The seventh, final tab is IRC. this is cool little feature that you won't see in the original version of gnutella. It works very similar to any other IRC client you're familar with, but it is somewhat lacking in the extra features deptartment. Still, kudos to William for putting this into the program. In summary, I found this program to be an excellent example of a java program done right. FURI for Java homepage download FURI for Java IBM Java Swing runtime download
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