The Freenet Project

Download Freenet 0.7.5

Important note for first time users

Freenet will run continually in the background, in order to maximise performance. Running it only when you are using it will not result in good performance. Freenet has a footprint of around 200MB of RAM and 10% of a modern CPU, so this should not be a problem. We strongly recommend you use the links on the start menu to shut down Freenet when you play computer games, and start it back up afterwards. We will implement a system tray icon for this in future.

If you know several people who are already using Freenet, you can enable high security and only connect to them, but if you do not know anyone on Freenet, you should set the security level to normal or low, and Freenet should just work.

Installation Instructions

Clicking the Install Freenet link should start the installer up, assuming you have Java installed. If it doesn't work for some reason, you can try the platform specific instructions (Windows instructions, Mac OSX instructions, Linux and Unix-like instructions).

Windows

- Download and run the installer (8MB)

It will automatically install Freenet and other required components for you. When done, your default browser will automatically open up to Freenet's web-based user interface.
(Freenet contains NO spyware or adware , it's Free Software! The source code is publicly available for review)

Freenet works best with Windows XP Professional. Freenet will run on Vista and Windows 7 but the uninstaller is not perfect on those systems. Freenet will not run on anything older than Windows 2000 Professional (i.e. 95/98/ME), and in any case you should not run an operating system for which security support has been discontinued.

Mac OSX

Install Freenet 0.7 using JavaWebStart.
If this doesn't work, try the linux instructions.

Linux and other Unix-like systems

You need to have a recent Java Runtime Environment (JRE). We have experienced best results with Sun's Java Runtime Environment which can be obtained via your package manager or from http://www.java.com/.
Java version 1.5 and later will work. However, be aware that there are applet security vulnerabilities in all versions prior to Java 1.5 update 4. Generally, we recommend using latest. Also, you will need wget for the below commands to work (on Ubuntu, apt-get install wget).

Open a terminal and type:

wget http://freenet.googlecode.com/files/new_installer_offline_1222.jar -O new_installer_offline.jar
java -jar new_installer_offline.jar

Alternatively, downloading the installer (gpg signature) and then clicking on the file may work on some systems, but if there are problems we recommend the above command lines.

Or do the following on a headless system:

wget http://downloads.freenetproject.org/alpha/installer/freenet07.tar.gz
cat freenet07.tar.gz | gzip -d | tar xv
cd freenet
./run.sh start

Read the FAQ on how to enable web-access from a remote computer.

Mirrored installation

If you have a working Freenet installation directory that you have mirrored from one Unix machine to another (e.g. via rsync or unison), enabling the mirrored installation is not difficult. Nothing in a Freenet installation cares about its host's IP address; it can't, or Freenet would fail on machines that get IP addressss from a DHCP pool

All you actually need to do is tell the system you've mirrored to that it should start the Freenet proxy daemon for you on boot. Do crontab -l on the source machine, find the line that is tagged "FREENET AUTOSTART" and add that to your crontab on the mirrored machine.

However: each installation has a unique identity key generated at installation time. If you try to run two instances with the same identity at the same time, both proxy demons will become confused and upset. Don't do this!

Firewalls and routers

Freenet should work fine with most routers, but if you are having problems and you have a firewall or router, click here for some info.

So it's running, what do I do?

When the installer closes, it should open a browser window pointing to the first-time wizard. Here you can configure basic settings, and then start using Freenet. You can access Freenet later on via the Browse Freenet icon on the desktop and your start menu. If the browser window isn't opened, for example because you used the headless installer, you should open it manually by clicking the Browse Freenet icon/menu item, or visiting:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/

For best security you should use a separate browser for Freenet, preferably in privacy mode. On Windows, the Browse Freenet icon will try to use Chrome in incognito mode if possible. Internet Explorer does not work well with Freenet, Firefox and Opera are widely used.

If you know anyone running Freenet, you can improve your security and help to build the network by connecting to their node. First, open the Add a friend page. You and your friend should each download their "node reference". Send the file to the other person, and add his node reference using the form at the bottom of the page. When both are added, your friend's node should show up on the Friends page, probably as "CONNECTED" or "BUSY". You can set a name for your node on the config page to make it easier to see who it is.

Note that you should only connect to nodes run by people you actually know. If you add noderefs from total strangers, this will not significantly improve your security (they could be NSA, after all), and will reduce the performance of the network.

So I'm connected, what do I do?

You can find links to some pages in the index on the FProxy homepage at:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/

You can find links to some third party applications for freenet.

It doesn't work, now what?

If you have problems installing or running Freenet, please contact us on the support list (subscribe here), or join us on IRC in the #freenet channel at irc.freenode.net.

Hardware requirements

Minimum: 400MHz Pentium 2, with at least 256MB of RAM, at least 1GB free disk space.
Recommended: 1GHz or more processor with 512MB RAM or more (especially if using Windows XP), 50GB disk space for a larger datastore and some downloads.

Freenet will use a portion of your disk for its datastore, it uses this to store data from your node and other nodes, you can configure this to any size from 100MB upwards, but we recommend at least 1GB. Freenet also uses disk space for your downloads. Freenet's memory usage is approximately 192MB plus 1MB for every 2GB of datastore.

Upgrading

Freenet provides now an update-over-freenet mechanism ; We recommend people to use it in favour of the updating scripts. However, you may also update your node manually:

Windows users can upgrade to the latest-stable Freenet release by clicking on "update.cmd" in the Freenet directory.
Linux users may similarly upgrade by running the update.sh shell script in the Freenet directory.

Note: You can still find the download page for Freenet 0.5 here, however 0.5 is no longer officially maintained or supported and 0.7 has many radical improvements not least being that it is significantly faster.

Source Code: See the developer page for git access, or download the lastest stable tarball here.