Below you'll find 2 tools that make it easy to use free OpenVPN servers from VPN Gate in Linux.

In case you're not familiar with VPN Gate, this is project that offers free VPN servers that are ran by volunteers who use SoftEther. It was designed with the Great Firewall of China in Mind and is sponsored by the University of Tsukuba, Japan.

For those not familiar with Hamachi, this is a VPN tool that's useful for establishing direct links between computers that are behind firewalls. Basically, Hamachi creates a connection over the Internet that emulates a local area network. It can be used for online gaming, remote desktop access, file sharing, etc.

(New Haguichi icon for Elementary Dark panel)

Haguichi is a Hamachi and Hamachi2 GUI for Gnome.

"Hamachi establishes a connection over the Internet that emulates the connection that would exist if the computers were connected over a local area network." So it's like a LAN over the internet which you can use to browse shares or play games that only work on LAN (among others). We've covered Haguichi quite a few times so read our previous posts for more info.

A new Haguichi version (1.0.3) has been released today which adds theme specific panel icons for Humanity, Ambiance, Radiance, Elementary and Elementary Dark.

Firstly, an introduction so you'll know what this is about:

Haguichi, the best Hamachi GUI for the GNOME Desktop reached version 1.0. The major new feature is that Haguichi supports the new Hamachi² Beta for Linux. The Hamachi² support includes:

A few days ago we posted an update to the script that installs Hamachi and 2 alternative GUIs in Linux, but the graphical user interfaces in that script don't integrate too well into the GNOME desktop.

But I've just discovered Haguichi and I recommend you give it a try. The first public release was launched just a few days ago but it's already very usable.

Before using it, make sure you have Hamachi installed (try our script which does everything automatically!).

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private network (VPN) shareware application capable of establishing direct links between computers that are behind NAT firewalls without requiring reconfiguration (in most cases); in other words, it establishes a connection over the Internet that emulates the connection that would exist if the computers were connected over a local area network.

A while back we translated a script which installs Hamachi in Ubuntu and also allows you to chose between two different graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Hamachi. The script only worked for Ubuntu Hardy, Gutsy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic but today I updated it to support Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Usually you'd have to compile Hamachi yourself, download and install a GUI for it and so on but using this script, everything is done automatically.