My name is Alberto Garcia and this is my first (well, second) post in Planet Debian. So I’ll introduce myself.

I’m a free software developer and enthusiast from Galicia, Spain. I studied computer science at the Corunha University, where I first heard about GNU/Linux and Debian. After leaving university I co-founded Igalia with a group of friends. We’ve been working on lots of different things during all these years, but some projects we’ve been particularly involved in include GNOME, Maemo/MeeGo and WebKit.

Although I’ve been using Debian for more than a decade now (my first -and still running!- installation was in 1997) and I’m quite familiar with the distribution, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started maintaining packages officially.

Apart from software, my other main hobby is music. When I’m not using my computer you’ll find me at some concert (preferably small bands: I hate long queues, crowded places and being far from the stage). It’s no coincidence that my first Debian package was a Last.fm player

I don’t have much more to add. I’d like to thank Ana for adding me to the planet, and I’m proud to be part of the Debian community!

FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis’s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it’s still the best one you can find on the net.

Igalia still provides a FileTea server at http://filetea.me/, that you can use to share your files and see how it works. We plan to keep offering this service, but you don’t need to trust it/depend on it anymore: now you can apt-get install filetea and have your own.

This is not a substitute for DropBox and the like. FileTea is not a file hosting service: the web server is only used to route the traffic, no data is stored there.

You can see it as a web-based P2P file sharing system, or a replacement for good ol’ DCC SEND. You don’t need to worry about firewalls or redirections: if you can surf the web, you can send the file. The only client that you need is your browser.

FileTea is a project developed by my fellow Igalian Eduardo Lima, and you can see more details about it here. It was written on top of EventDance, a peer-to-peer inter-process communication library based on GLib and also written by him (see also The Web jumps into D-Bus).

FileTea is free software and you can download it and install it in your machine.

We have also set up a server at http://filetea.me/.

Important: this is still an alpha release and our bandwith is limited so bear with us if you find any problem

Happy sharing!