With all the hooplah over Napster's fate, you might be left wondering where you can continue to get your MP3 fix. There really are quite a few alternatives left, whatever happens to Napster.
Napster was simply the start of it all. Improvements have been made over time not only upon the client software, but also upon the server protocol. The OpenNap protocol (http://opennap.sourceforge.net) is one example. The current release, as I write this, is 0.41, released March 3, 2001. This server runs on OS/2, various UNIX/Linux flavors, and Windows 9x/2000/NT. The project summary page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/opennap/. You can always run your own OpenNap server if you have the bandwidth (hopefully, a T-1 or better) and the computing resources. Then your MP3 availability problems are pretty much history.
This latest version of OpenNap also has improved support for another tool you should check out called Napigator (http://www.napigator.com). Napigator is a tool that gives you a list of all the current Napster and Opennap servers at a given time. Actually, Napigator itself is rather Windows-centric, but there are similar tools designed to do what it does and run on UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. My favorite is NapMan (http://napman.sourceforge.net). This little tool will provide you a list of currently active Nap and Opennap servers and give you information about each server. It helps you decide which Napster server to connect to. It displays current statistics about each server, such as number of users logged in, number of MP3 files available, and gigabytes of files available for download.
NapMan also lets you ping a server to test its response time. This can be critical when you want to do some serious downloading. Few things are so frustrating as trying to download your favorite files when response times are miserable. This tool lets you test the server's response time before you log in.
A similar tool is called WebNap (http://webnap.sourceforge.net). As I write, the current version is 1.1.0. Webnap is a set of PHP and Perl scripts that you run on your local webserver. MySQL is also required, along with PHP. You'll need to install all of these. The idea is that you set up your own WebNap space on your local server (say, in ~/public_html/webnap/), and create your own database of MP3 files which you can access from WebNap. More information can be found at the project page: http://sourceforge.net/webnap/. WebNap also communicates with MyNapster-compatible (see http://www.mynapster.com) servers.
There is also a MyNapster webclient, which is a collection of cgi scripts you can run on your own web server. Please read the information on http://mynapster.sourceforge.net before using either the MyNapster client or server. None of these is as easy or as efficient as WinMX, the Windows MyNapster client. This one application alone might persuade you to try out Win4Lin or VMWare or one of the hardware multiplexors that allow you to run several operating systems simultaneously.
Mynapster is first and foremost a community of people sharing digital files using the latest version of the OpenNap protocol, which allows sharing of all types of files, not just MP3 files. They're working on sharing eBooks from Project Guttenberg (http://www.guttenberg.net) and films too. They are also looking for ways to remunerate artists for their work.
I couldn't go very far in talking about peer-to-peer file sharing without mentioning Gnutella (www.gnutella.wego.com). This is the protocol that started the next generation of digital file sharing. Linux/UNIX clients are available for it, such as Hagelslag (http://tiefighter.et.tudelft.nl/hagelslag/download.html) and Gnut (http://www.gnutelliums.com/linux_unix/gnut/). These are commandline clients, but there is also a GTK-Gnutella available (see http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net). A couple of Java cross-platform Gnutella implementations are available: Furi and LimeWire (see http://www.gnutelliums.com/linux_unix/). My personal experience is that all of these clients work, with some experimentation. None of them work as smoothly as the Windows clients do, simply because they are not as mature. But they're free and open source, and they will let you share photos, audio files, movies, and whatever other kinds of files you care to search for. Of them all, I would say Gnut is the most usable today. Though it's a commandline interface, there is ample documentation, and the text interface is actually clear and simple.
So, what's the conclusion? Mine is to keep using Napster with Opennap servers, and connect using the MyNap client mentioned above. I've still been able to find lots of Hendrix and Metallica MP3s available for download. (Those are heavily copyrighted materials, so they are a sort of litmus test of how ``free'' a server is.) Some good Opennap clients are XmNap, Gnapster, GTK-Napster, Gnome-Napster, Snap, TkNap, and the commandline clients, such as TekNap and Nap. I have tried each of these clients, and they seem to connect to OpenNap servers just fine.
All is not lost just because Napster is filtering copyrighted songs. The OpenNap servers which MyNap can show you will keep you in MP3s for quite a while. And then there are the Gnutella clients I mentioned if you'd like to try another alternative. There are various other alternative communities too, but most of the ones I've seen either don't have UNIX/Linux clients or are otherwise not free or are not yet large enough to support hungry audiophiles. One place to keep you abreast of the digital audio lifestyle is http://www.techtv.com/audiofile. There are links from there to other audio havens, such as sonicnet.com and mp3.com.
Also, you should check out some of the free-music related sites on the Net, such as http://www.futureofmusic.org for example. Sites like this concern future paradigms of distributing music while supporting artists as well. But if all you want is to listen to fine music on your Linux/UNIX computer, here are some other sites of interest: