Gaim An Open-source Instant-messaging Client

By Author: Sulamita Berrezi
Total Articles: 115
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Gaim, an open-source, instant-messaging client, is one of the most popular clients in use today. It can be downloaded from http://gaim.sourceforge.net and installed on a variety of operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and OS X. Gaim allows you to connect to a very wide variety of IM networks, including AIM, ICQ, MSN,Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, QQ, and Jabber. In addition, Gaim's support of Jabber allows it to connect directly to Google's Talk server. The Gaim download page (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php) lists a number of RPM package management archives available for many of the newest and most popular Linux distributions, though many popular distributions are still not supported. If you aren't interested in one of the mainline RPM distributions, you can download the Autopackage version of Gaim or the full source code. Autopackage is a new style of installer similar to the Windows install wizards. Autopackage installation is simple: Download the package, give it execute permission, and run it. If you are unable to install the RPM or Autopackage versions of Gaim, you might be forced to compile it straight from the ...
... source code. Although many users prefer this method, it's not for the faint of heart, and neither is it for new Linux users.The INSTALL file inside the distribution contains the exact installation procedure. Since the instructions are subject to change, we will not outline them here, but suffice it to say that the typical ./configure ; make ; make install commands work well for most installations.Automake is designed to facilitate these simplified installation instructions. Be sure that GnuTLS (www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/) is installed before compiling from source, because Gaim requires it to be able to log into the Google Talk network. Without it, your client will display ERROR: Server does not use any supported authentication method when trying to connect to Google Talk.