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Domain: pidgin.im

Stories and comments across the archive that link to pidgin.im.

Comments · 128

  1. Pidgin does not support voice or video chat by tepples · · Score: 1 · on Promoting FOSS to People Who Don't Care
    The following are representative of comments that you might get. How would you handle them?

    When people are buying a new computer, I encourage them to try OpenOffice before buying MS Office. I'm pretty sure that OpenOffice.org won't run Stone Edge Order Manager, an application written in Access+VBA that my employer uses to track inventory and orders for over 150,000 distinct products.

    When people complain about the loud ads in AIM, or having to run 4 different programs for AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo, I promote Pidgin. I installed Pidgin, and now I can't use voice and video chat.

    When somebody can't get a media file to run, I suggest they try out VLC. On my machine running Windows XP, VLC cuts off the first second and last second of Vorbis files that I play through it. (But I did get it to work by going to Vorbis.com and downloading the illiminable codecs for Windows Media Player.)

    Once somebody is using most of the above software on Windows, I might suggest they try Linux if they voice a complaint about Windows I tried this Linux thing, and SANE didn't autodetect the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 USB flatbed scanner that I own. I visited the SANE Project web site, and the model is listed as unsupported. The scanner came with a CD with drivers designed for Windows; is there a way for me to use these under Ubuntu? Or would I be the other who got a Mac?
  2. Re:This is a first, open source anything for Alaba by KiranWolf · · Score: 1 · on Alabama Schools to be First in US to Get XO Laptop

    If you think this is the first open source project for Alabama, you obviously have never heard of Gaim (now Pidgin) or Asterisk, both of which were started by Mark Spencer (an Auburn grad from Huntsville). Phorum also got its start in Huntsville as well.

  3. Re:In my opinion by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1 · on The Fine Line Between Security and Usability

    Where else should the line be drawn? Unfortunately there is no line nicely "between" usability and security, because the two are in direct conflict.

    Bruce Schneir needs a slap for ever perpetuating this lie. Some security measures do decrease "usability," while others just make a developers' job harder but not an end user's (do you ever feel the need for root access to do non-administrative tasks on Linux? No? Yet on Windows stuff breaks why... oh badly coded apps that write to Program Files/ to store settings in a .ini). When done right, a lot of the "usability loss" involves having to enter a system admin password to do administrative tasks, or some other such thing.

    Address space layout radomization, non-executable stacks, and proper fixes for broken code like this trivial bounds checking error (hint: these MDBs are broken anyway, they will crash access, if it can't open them because of the fix you haven't lost anything) all irritate developers to no end. Why should I have to fix my code just so some end user can use it without crashes and security breaches? But when it comes to the end user, it works now so he doesn't care, and "usability" doesn't really go down at all while "security" goes up.

    Stop wasting your time with that usability-security juxtaposition argument. Spend your time trying to solve the problems instead. Minimize the interaction of security systems with the user, but make sure it does interfere with them where it has to (for example, see Pidgin ticket 3381 about an SSL/TLS bug where the user isn't involved enough, and how to properly annoy them in the least invasive way possible).

  4. Re:DIfferent use cases by tepples · · Score: 1 · on In The US, Email Is Only For Old People

    Email is still king. I can use attachments So can many IM protocols.

    it is platform independent (which IM is most-definitely NOT) What prevents developers from implementing, say, libpurple on the platforms that you think can't use instant messaging? Besides, if you have IRC then you have IM.
  5. Pidgin by upside · · Score: 2, Insightful · on Torvalds On Pluggable Security Models

    Never having used that software, I had a look at http://www.pidgin.im/about/. It says

    Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes.

    How is a shortcoming of this software a shortcoming of Linux? You may be right to say there is no combined im/VOIP/video conferencing suites for Linux. Sounds strange to me, though. Perhaps you can make a feature request for Pidgin.

  6. Re:Ah, well ... by Curtman · · Score: 1 · on Internet Blackout in Myanmar Stalls Citizen Report

    Now I'm no birdkeeper, but have you ever tried to gzip a pigeon before?

    It's probably much easier to gzip a pidgin.
  7. Re:LOL at the urban definition of a Gimp by skoaldipper · · Score: 1 · on The GIMP UI Redesign

    so to the "street" (or younger population who you should be targetting) its an insult (has been my whole life and im 39), hardly surprising nobody wants to use it
    Possibly.

    But if talented GIMP contributors were more concerned about the forces of marketing than development, that would just make them a stool.

    Whether by legal writ or by infant decree, I use what I use despite what others might think of me.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, my toast is ready. Hmm. Where did I put my smuckers jelly at?
  8. Well nobody's really chimed in with IM yet by CaptainPatent · · Score: 5, Informative · on Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software

    There was someone above who mentioned Trillian, but by far my favorite pick is Pidgin IM (formerly Gaim)

    You avoid all of the bloat of AIM and MSN Messenger (which is now beyond ridiculous) plus you rid yourself of the need to install several messaging clients which further saves space and startup time plus it keeps your system tray (in windows) much cleaner. And the best part, it's available as open source for Windows and Linux!

  9. My Favoritse by TychoCelchuuu · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software

    I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.

  10. So what? by ajs318 · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Linspire/Microsoft Agreement Useless to Users

    Hopefully this will just put people off using Linspire, which is no big deal in the long term. Last I checked, Linspire was full of all manner of nasty closed-source shite which the world would be better off without. If the Debian developers aren't pissed off to the back teeth at the way some people (and not just Linspire) have bastardised their "100% i-tal forever" distro, they deserve sainthood in at least as many religions as there are platforms on which Debian runs.

    Never forget, it was Linspire who provided a lot of the funding for Pidgin when it was called Gaim (which was so staunchly GPL that they didn't even make the usual OpenSSL exception; it was GNUTLS or no MSN), then -- as soon as they realised that the terms of the GPL meant they could never get the code all to themselves, cage it up and take away the Source Code -- left the developers right in the lurch with the AOL lawsuit.

    Fortunately, the GPL prevailed; the developers were able to fork their own code and give it a new name, but it just goes to show how some people will double-cross you at the last minute.

  11. Re:Best news all day by colonslashslash · · Score: 2, Informative · on Microsoft Patents the Mother of All Adware

    http://pidgin.im/pidgin/home/

  12. Re:Gtalk ? by slummy · · Score: 1 · on Google Desktop Now on Linux

    There are plenty of multi-protocol clients that can handle the Jabber protocol.

    Here's one.

  13. What? NO command line? by m1sha · · Score: 1 · on Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

    but what about (http://tmsnc.sourceforge.net/) and finch(http://pidgin.im/pidgin/home/) for those who despise the bloated whale that is the X windowing system.

  14. Re:There's no great client. by resiak · · Score: 1 · on Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

    ctrl+tabbing through windows never worked for me, pressing escape doesn't close the window, it constantly gets moved to the second screen, is rather slowish, etc

    Hrm:

  15. Re:bsflite by dave1g · · Score: 1 · on Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

    oops i think I meant to send this to you

    GAIM -Text is now called finch, this is an ncurses text mode interface to all the networks that pidgin supports

    http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch [pidgin.im]

  16. Re:bsflite by dave1g · · Score: 1 · on Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

    GAIM -Text is now called finch, this is an ncurses text mode interface to all the networks that pidgin supports

    http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch

  17. Re:I'm very impressed with Ubuntu by pinkstuff · · Score: 1 · on After Ubuntu, Windows Looks Increasingly Bad

    I now use Pidgin on Windows and haven't looked back, it is a vast improvement over Gaim. I will install on my home Ubuntu once it comes off of beta, and is easily apt-get'able. For the benefit of those that don't know, Pidgin is the new version of Gaim under a new name.

  18. Re:Distributed version control gaining ground in F by Black+Acid · · Score: 3, Informative · on Linus on GIT and SCM

    Monotone's inode prints (which, incidentially, Linus was a major contributor of) can speed up some things, but the initial pull of a large repository is still unacceptably slow. The Pidgin developers have worked around this performance bottleneck by supplying bzip2'd Monotone databases via http, which the developer then can sync with the latest repository on pidgin.im to obtain an up-to-date database with the latest changes. Partial pulls should partially fix this problem in a future release of Monotone, or so I hear.

    For what it's worth, I use Monotone daily and find the performance acceptable. For the record, Linus used Monotone at a particularly bad time it its development cycle, when it was very slow and the main designer was on vacation. Nonetheless, the Monotone developers emphasize correctness and integrity over speed, and Mercurial and Git were direct responses to the performance of Monotone. Still, the performance of Monotone is always improving.

  19. Re:Well, speaking from my own experience... by Black+Acid · · Score: 5, Informative · on Linus on GIT and SCM

    Its been over a year so I don't remember the details of GIT, but I remember having to do a lot of things "twice". Need to do a checkout? Two commands. Need to commit? Two commands. It was a bitch to use and I am glad I'm done with it. SVN, on the other hand, I felt very comfortable with from the start

    Most distributed version control systems exhibit this phenomena, because by "checking out" you are actually doing two operations: pulling the latest changes from someone else, and updating your workspace. For example, in Monotone you would type (I imagine git operates similarly):

    mtn pull
    mtn update


    The first command retrieves revisions from the server, and the second updates your workspace with those new changes. To "commit" a change, in a distributed version control system you first 1) commit the change to your local repository and then 2) push it to someone else:

    mtn commit
    mtn push


    It is often useful to keep these operations separate. For example, you can commit without pushing. Make a bunch of changes, commit each one separately, and only push once you're satisfied with the result. Other developers can still see each change you made individually, but only after you've pushed, so they won't be stuck with an incomplete in-progress version of the tree.

    Similarly, by being able to update without pulling, you can revert to any revision you would like without contacting the network. Likewise, since commit does not require network access, it is no extra effort to work offline. Once an Internet connection is available, you can synchronize your repositories, but in the meantime you can make any change you want - even with no network connection.

    The main disadvantage of a decentralized version control system is that it requires workflow changes to get the most out of it. If you are only familiar with centralized version control systems, it will take some time getting used to. But I'm glad to say, an increasing number of projects are making the change to distributed version control, among them, Mozilla and Pidgin. They are not using Git (but Mercurial and Monotone, respectively) but they're all distributed. Git is being used by the Beryl project, among others. Subversion has momentum in FOSS because it is familiar for those used to centralized version control (everyone knows CVS), and SourceForge provides free SVN hosting. Once a free open source hosting site provides hosting for a distributed version control system, I expect more low-resource open source projects to use it.
  20. Distributed version control gaining ground in FOSS by Black+Acid · · Score: 5, Informative · on Linus on GIT and SCM

    The ultimate reason why Linus dislikes SVN, CVS, etc. is that it is centralized. Everyone checks out source from a central server and commits their changes to the same centralized area. This has problems: your workspace is not versioned. By this I mean, you cannot track local changes to your workspace without committing them to the central server.

    A common pattern in development is to try one approach, test it, tweak it, and possibly try another approach if the first did not work out, perhaps reverting to a prior approach. With decentralized version control, you can commit your changes to a local repository and work from there. All the locally changes you make are versioned, and be committed, checked out, examined all without contacting a central repository. This is ideal, because you often want to try various options to find the one that works best, before pushing your changes to the rest of the world. In centralized version control, you can use a branch for this purpose, but often branches in these systems are difficult to either create, merge, or maintain, so they are rarely used. The end result is that with centralized version control, developers version their workspace in their head. DVCS systems remove the mental burden.

    Fortunately, FOSS developers are realizing the usefulness of DVCS and major projects are converting to some form of DVCS. Mozilla is switching to Mercurial. The Pidgin project, which just released 2.0.1, is using Monotone. (Linus favorably mentioned both of these distributed version control systems in his Git talk, as they are both are distributed).

    Once you accept that DVCS is better than the centralized model (which may not be true for some situations), only a few (but growing number of) version control systems are viable. This is currently a hot area in open source development, with software such as GNU Arch, Monotone, Mercurial, Git, Darcs, Bazaar, and more paving the way. Many open source DVCS's are still in development and not ready for general usage. I can't speak for Mercurial, but Monotone doesn't have the greatest performance, instead preferring integrity over speed. This led Linus to write git, since speed is very crucial for a large project like the Linux kernel.

    Whatever the actual program (git, Mercuial, or Monotone), more and more open source developers are realizing the advantages that distributed version control can offer. I encourage all developers that haven't used any DVCS to try it -- once you do, you won't go back.

  21. Distributed version control gaining ground in FOSS by Black+Acid · · Score: 5, Informative · on Linus on GIT and SCM

    The ultimate reason why Linus dislikes SVN, CVS, etc. is that it is centralized. Everyone checks out source from a central server and commits their changes to the same centralized area. This has problems: your workspace is not versioned. By this I mean, you cannot track local changes to your workspace without committing them to the central server.

    A common pattern in development is to try one approach, test it, tweak it, and possibly try another approach if the first did not work out, perhaps reverting to a prior approach. With decentralized version control, you can commit your changes to a local repository and work from there. All the locally changes you make are versioned, and be committed, checked out, examined all without contacting a central repository. This is ideal, because you often want to try various options to find the one that works best, before pushing your changes to the rest of the world. In centralized version control, you can use a branch for this purpose, but often branches in these systems are difficult to either create, merge, or maintain, so they are rarely used. The end result is that with centralized version control, developers version their workspace in their head. DVCS systems remove the mental burden.

    Fortunately, FOSS developers are realizing the usefulness of DVCS and major projects are converting to some form of DVCS. Mozilla is switching to Mercurial. The Pidgin project, which just released 2.0.1, is using Monotone. (Linus favorably mentioned both of these distributed version control systems in his Git talk, as they are both are distributed).

    Once you accept that DVCS is better than the centralized model (which may not be true for some situations), only a few (but growing number of) version control systems are viable. This is currently a hot area in open source development, with software such as GNU Arch, Monotone, Mercurial, Git, Darcs, Bazaar, and more paving the way. Many open source DVCS's are still in development and not ready for general usage. I can't speak for Mercurial, but Monotone doesn't have the greatest performance, instead preferring integrity over speed. This led Linus to write git, since speed is very crucial for a large project like the Linux kernel.

    Whatever the actual program (git, Mercuial, or Monotone), more and more open source developers are realizing the advantages that distributed version control can offer. I encourage all developers that haven't used any DVCS to try it -- once you do, you won't go back.

  22. Gaim themes are fine, try upgrading by Michael+Wardle · · Score: 1 · on Independent Human Interface Guidelines

    The latest version of Gaim (called Pidgin) fits in really well on my Windows XP system. It looks right, whichever theme you're using.

    Perhaps you're using an older version of the GTK library. Pidgin relies on GTK for theme support, so it's important you have the right version of that. (You would expect that newer versions have fewer bugs and better theme support.)

    Try re-installing the latest version, and be sure to download the recommended version (pidgin.exe) rather than the lightweight version (pidgin-nogtk.exe).

  23. Re:Maybe KDE & Gnome Folk Will Read... by ArcticFlood · · Score: 1 · on Independent Human Interface Guidelines

    Wait, you're complaining about Gaim 2? There's no such version. That's a beta build you're showing. Furthermore, Gaim was not a Gnome application. Gaim was (and Pidgin is) a GTK application, but not Gnome.

    I can agree that GTK looks bad on Windows. However, the WIMP theme for GTK makes things look more Windows-like. Pidgin also looks nicer than Gaim did, especially in the buddy list.

  24. Re:That takes me back. by jlowe · · Score: 1 · on Thousands of ICQ Numbers Deleted

    Yes, it serves it's purpose well. GAIM is now known as Pidgin.

    Check it out. It does take a little learning to get used to the interface, but it's a very nice product.

  25. Re:Backups? by Crispin+Glover · · Score: 1 · on Thousands of ICQ Numbers Deleted

    What's GAIM?

  26. Slashdotted by Brainix · · Score: 2, Informative · on Pidgin 2.0 Released

    Uh oh. The Pidgin server seems to be hammered, but you can still download it from its SourceForge page.

  27. From the Fine Article: by wild_berry · · Score: 2, Informative · on Gaim Renamed — Now Pidgin IM

    Instant Messaging Freedom Corporation

  28. Donating to Pidgin/Gaim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting · on Gaim Renamed — Now Pidgin IM

    It seems the Pidgin/Gaim donation policy has been updated as well.

    On the old web site they explicitly refused donations (Can I give you money/hardware/other expensive things ... ? No. We're completely fool-hardy and won't accept any gratuities with no strings attached for just being good guys.).

    In the same area on the new web site this has disappeared.

    So, does Pidgin now accept donations?