i have just installed xmule on Fedora. the first time i ran it, i could never connect to any servers (i may have been doing it wrong b/c i've never used xmule before, any suggestions on that are appreciated too). Anyways, back to the main problem. I changed my preferences to auto connect on startup. Now every time i start xmule, it crashes after like 10 sec. Any Suggestions??

Hm, first try to get rid of the auto connect on start up. If neccessary, delete your ~/.xMule directory to do this but before you do this, make a copy of ~/.xMule/server.met to ~/server.met, for example.

Now restart xMule. This should make a new ~/.xMule directory. then copy your old ~/server.met back into the ~/.xMule directory. Restart xMule once more but from the command line using the command xmule. You should now have a server list in the server window.

If you have a firewall (iptables) running, make sure the xMule ports are open. The needed ports are shown in your xMule -> Preferences -> Connection Window.

If your ports are open, right click on a server (Not those with a the most users) and select "Connect to this server". Check the log messages and report back.

got it working now.

many thanks, i appreciate the help.

I do have just one more quetions:
How do i get more list of servers or how do i know the better servers to connect to? do i just hit the "Update Server List" every time i connect and then feel around for the best?

This server list method is somewhat outdated. You needed to use that back in the eDonkey days. With eMule/xMule you get 5-20 new server adresses whenever you connect to a server. I haven't updated my server list for 6 or 9 month.

Additionally, the lugdunum patched servers can manage up to 200.000 clients today. You shouldn't have any problems finding sources when you use a server with low ping and more than 50.000 clients.

The only problem with some updated lugdunum servers and xMule right now is the missing on-the-fly compression functionality which xMule misses at the moment. Thus you won't be able to connect to some servers but this hopefully gets fixed in xMule 1.7.1

Happy downloading.