H H \ / H C -- H H / | / N == C N --- C -- H / \ | | H -- C C -- C C -- H \\ // / \ / \ C -- C H C H / \ / \ H H H H nicotine (C10H14N2)
Wild tobacco, is essentially a weed. As such, it is accustomed to growing in soils and environments that are not the best for other plants for varied reasons. Insects are one of those reasons.
Tobacco plants actually produce nicotine to kill bugs. Thats right. You are addicted to insecticide.
Written in Python, it is an updating/rewriting of an older client, Pyslsk, which is now no longer being updated. While it is primarily designed for Gnu/Linux systems and uses GTK and PyGTK, many people have reported making it work successfully on OSX as well.
In my own experience Nicotine is a nicer client to use than the Windows version, having all the same functionality (friend list, instant messaging, queuing of full folders, share to friends only option) plus some additional functions that are not currently available on the windows client, such as blocking IP addresses by country.
I had some problems installing this at first, even from RPMs, as it seemed to have some circular dependency problems which took several attempts to resolve, but it was the first application I had tried to install as a linux newbie, and no-one else I've spoken to has had these problems, so YMMV.
The only real problem I've had with Nicotine is that it is very memory-intensive, and will often freeze up on an older machine when other applications are running, or when it has been left running for more than a few hours (particularly galling when you have something queued behind several hundred people, get to the front of the line, and then it freezes, sometimes forcing you back to the end of the queue). This can cause a major problem if you have to kill the app - sometimes when you restart it after a forced kill, it comes back having lost all your user data, including your queued files.
This data is all backed up in the config.old file, and supposedly all that needs doing is to delete the config file, reinstall the program and then rename config.old to config . While others have reported success with this method, in my experience it rarely works, and it becomes necessary laboriously to go through the config.old file and manually re-add the information. But at least the information is saved somewhere, unlike many other file-sharing programs.(Update 28th May 2004 since writing this a later version, 1.08rc1, has been released. After two weeks of using this, while it still freezes as much as ever, it doesn't seem to lose the data any more)
On the whole I cannot unambiguously recommend Nicotine, but given the fairly poor competition, in the field of *nix file-sharing programs it's the best of a bad bunch.
Nicotine can be downloaded from http://nicotine.thegraveyard.org
Nicotine is a client for the SoulSeek peer to peer file sharing network. Nicotine is based on pyslsk, the original python SoulSeek client. Pyslsk is now no longer updated, and nicotine has picked up where pyslsk left off. Nicotine, unlike pyslsk, uses GTK2, and as such is a much more attractive program to use. It has some issues with speed and memory usage, especially when scanning shared files, and returning search results. Nicotine can also run on OSX, using Fink. The nicotine chat room is a somewhat friendly place to go for advice on setting up the program on OSX, assuming you can get to it in the first place.
Nicotine is currently at 1.0.8rc1, and avaliable at http://nicotine.thegraveyard.org. It is GPL'd and supports psycho extentions to improve its speed. Nicotine is eventually planned to be replaced by museekd, a SoulSeek daemon programmed in C++. Museekd will be controlled through front-end applications. Museekd, however is not available as of yet.
Nic"o*tine (? ∨ ?), n. [F. nicotine. See Nicotian.] Chem.
An alkaloid which is the active principle of tobacco. It is a colorless, transparent, oily liquid, having an acrid odor, and an acrid burning taste. It is intensely poisonous.
Ure.
© Webster 1913.
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