Gaim Forks To Get Voice And Video Support

RAMMS+EIN writes "Everyone's favorite instant messenger, Gaim, has recently been forked. The new gaim-vv project aims to provide voice and video chat support, which will eventually be backported into the main branch." Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Comments

Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm a kopete fan...

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[gid13]

Me too... However... It'd be nice if EITHER ONE would implement some of the things that Trillian can do, particularly working file transfer (at least, all of mine in Kopete mess up at 98% either way for no reason I'm aware of, and I don't think Gaim even tries).

I would also love the ability to have sounds only when the window in question is out of focus. A skinnable interface that can be made transparent is nice. Kopete should really get the ability to be integrated into the Universal Sidebar (to approximate Trillian's docking ability) also, although I think they're working on this one.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't use kopete a lot (it never really worked for me, and it depends on KDE), so what I say here may not be exactly accurate (hmm, IANAL is a lot shorter. Ok, IANAKU).

I think kopete was/is cooperating with GnomeMeeting for getting video chat. This is a great move, but do know that GnomeMeeting doesn't actually interoperate with any of the major instant messengers anymore. It uses the H.323 protocol, which was used by MicroSoft Netmeeting and old versions of MSN Messenger, but all instant messengers use proprietary protocols these days. gaim-vv aims to interoperate with those.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Narchie Troll]

Gaim has had file transfer working fine for a few versions now. I use it all the time.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[RAMMS EIN]

Gaim evolves quickly. File transfers work both ways for at least AIM and IRC (I wrote the IRC support based on the AIM code), and I think the MSN and Yahoo plugins have been able to at least receive files for a long time now, so chances are they can also send files now.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[opello]

'chances are' ? not quite ... at least for me using latest 'stable'

i'd like to see support for msn pics, like amsn
i don't keep up with the drama that is gaim so i don't know if they are planning on implimenting it or not

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that Imodium-AD works better than Kopete, myself.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think........... - wrong chances are......... - wrong again mod it down please

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[fdobbie]

MSN certainly cannot send or receive files at the moment, but people are working on it.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Doug Neal]

Why did this get modded down?

I switched from Gaim to Kopete when KDE 3.2 was released. It fits in better with the rest of my KDE desktop and seems a bit more complete.. it's got all the protocol support gaim has. One particularly nice feature is meta-contacts. If you've got the same person under multiple protocols you can add them to the same meta-contact and they only show up in the list once.

Also supports MSN display pictures and file transfers (although they have a habit of aborting halfway through so no good for big files), and unlike gaim it not only notifies you when the other person closes the chat window, it notifies you when they open one too, before they've even typed anything... people can get very suprised when they open a window and I speak first :)

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI (not saying one is better than the other) in Gaim, right-click on a buddy -> "expand" allows you to group multiple screenames (of the same person).

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

Interoperating with proprietary protocols is sure great. Erm.

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

The gaim metacontacts are really nice, but I think that the word "expand" should be changed. At least it took me a long time to discover the feature. How about something like "Meta contact" or "Several screen names".

Hmm.. actually the word "screen name" is also slightly confusing. English is not my mother tongue, so when I try to add a buddy I always get confused about the words "alias" and "screen name". Which is the account, and which is the name that I choose :)

Re:Well, not everyone's favourite

[acidtripp101]

Why not just look at how Kopete does it?
Kopete can ONLY transfer files through MSN.
This site should show how

Too many choices

[bonch]

Nice to see an amicable fork; it sounds like this will mean competition for GnomeMeeting.

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

Re:Too many choices

[c0bw3b]

Nah, i think ultimately this will be a good thing. Rather than having a seperate program for video chat and IM an all in one program will be easier to deal with.

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS EIN]

Right, people don't want to be swamped with options, but they do want to have voice and video chat.

The comment about GnomeMeeting is quite inaccurate, as GnomeMeeting uses the H.323 protocol, which was used by Netmeeting and old versions of MSN Messenger, but is not used by any messengers these days. What gaim-vv aims to provide is voice and video chat with AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, etc, that is, the protocols that people actually _use_.

Re:Too many choices

[sglane81]

Competition drives innovation.

Re:Too many choices

[sirsnork]

The way I see this fork is basically like an unstable branch of the linux kernel. This way they can just work on the video and voice without messing up gaims normal development and without having to work out why something has broken because someone else applied a patch for something unrelated that breaks it. This way the only patches applied with be fore video and voice, and once thats working properly they can drop it into the current devel branch and make it work

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS EIN]

``I don't want voice or video chat. I talk to people in real life or via phonograph.''

Do write a plugin for that, so that us Gaim users can have it too!

Re:Too many choices

[MikeFM]

There is nothing wrong with H.323. It's just that the IM companies like to use their own protocols so they can lock users in. I'd like to see support for all of those protocols and H.323.

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

What gaim-vv aims to provide is voice and video chat with AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, etc, that is, the protocols that people actually _use_.

Those are also the protocols that are under the control of companies with their own financial interests. How long do you think those companies are going to provide access to open source clients when those services don't fit into their business plan and stop looking like attractive business propositions anymore?

GnomeMeeting and H.323 are easy to use. They talk to existing video conferencing hardware, give you full control over how you connect and what directory services you use, and easily run even serverless. If you use AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo, or any of the others, it's just stupid.

At the very least, let's hope that GAIM-vv will provide full access to standards-based H.323 video conferencing, in addition to its support for proprietary services. But it really should pop up a big warning dialog every time anybody uses AIM, MSN, or Yahoo!: "This service may be discontinued or become unavailable without warning any day. [OK?]".

Re:Too many choices

[October_30th]

But competition at the cost of standardization hurts everybody.

Re:Too many choices

[Krunch]

"This service may be discontinued or become unavailable without warning any day. [OK?]"

You could say the same for any closed-source software.

Re:Too many choices

[nut]

I'm sorry, H.323 is a complete pile of horse nuggets, and I say that as someone who uses it. I have to accept connections on 12 different tcp ports on my firewall, and open up 12 different udp ports at the same time. And support about 10 different audio codecs and probably a similar number of video codecs.

I can only do this on one PC on my home network because I haven't got a special h.323-friendly firewall.

I have to know how to set my firewall up in the first place, if it comes to that.

If you want to see voip done right, look at Skype. Now if gaim were to become interoperable with Skype that would be pretty cool...

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

The situation is similar, and it's a reason to avoid closed-source software, but it's not quite the same. Most closed-source software keeps running even if is discontinued. So, you can keep running WordPerfect on DOS for years if you like, until the hardware breaks or you get tired of it. With a proprietary service, things can stop working without warning from one day to the next.

Re:Too many choices

[CoreyGH]

From the Skype FAQ:
Which protocols does Skype use?
Skype uses a proprietary protocol which we have developed. We looked at many available protocols when designing Skype and none were good enough for us. We hope you agree!

Re:Too many choices

[hak1du]

I fail to see how a choice of two (completely different and incompatible) video chat solutions would constitute "too many choices". Once we get to, say, ten, then let's worry about "too many choices".

Re:Too many choices

[RAMMS EIN]

Oh, I very much agree with you that we should go for open standards. That's why I use IRC for chatting. :-) However, supporting the protocols that the major IM networks use is going to feel very good to a lot of people.

Re:Too many choices

[hachete]

We need more choice, but only choices which are not clones of each other. Look at MySQL - it's made good not by being a clone of Oracle but by figuring out the bits people want then backfilling in the rest as it goes along.

h

Re:Too many choices

[jg_elliott]

I always wondered why stuff like the msn protocl hasn't been turned into a standard library by someone, then all im clients could use this library without worrying about re-inventing the wheel. It would be the end of people choosing different clients because the one they want lacks an important function, like file sending or recieving. The client writers could then focus on other issues, like adding cool features like the translator function in kopete.

Re:Too many choices

[Hast]

Reverse engineering?

Of course it's probably harder than with eg P2P protocols. But it can still be done. And I bet they use some standard protocols for audio and video coding. It's too much work to implement otherwise.

Re:Too many choices

[Specialist2k]

I'd like to see support for all of those protocols and H.323.

s/H\.323/SIP/;

While not being an ideal solution either, SIP is much more NAT-friendly than H.323 and has an increasing number of hardware phones available.

Re:Too many choices

[McDutchie]

But competition at the cost of standardization hurts everybody.

So how does this come at the cost of standardization? Are the forked versions somehow unable to talk to each other?

Re:Too many choices

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but the only way I get to cam2cam with naked chicks/couples is through AIM/MSN/Yahoo. If I can do this without booting up Windows, that'd be great.

Re:Too many choices

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want to see voip done right, look at Skype. Now if gaim were to become interoperable with Skype that would be pretty cool..."

Sure, if you want your computer loaded up with spyware, look at Skype.

Re:Too many choices

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the good people at gaim are working on splitting gaim into libgaim and a gui. This means that we can use libgaim to create an IM client for gnustep.

Re:Too many choices

[Joe Tie.]

Great, more "competition." See my sig.

What your sig gets wrong though is that there is no generic lump of 'people'. I'm a person, and I do want an endless amount of choices. It's one of the reasons I use Linux. Now if your sig read 'the average computer user considering using Linux dosn't want an endless amount of choices', then I'd agree. And I'd also not really care what they want. We've got a high enough user base to get the occasional port of games, and 3D drivers - that's more than enough for what I want. Past that, why should I care about more people using the same operating system as me than I'd care about people using the same brand of sock? Especially if to get them to wear that sock, it'd have to be shrunk to a level uncomfortable for my foot.

Re:Too many choices

[rbanffy]

I am not sure if reverse engineering every proprietary audio/video conferencing protocol is a wise or viable idea.

If there is a free alternative (no h.323, please - I had to configure a firewall to work with it and I will never do it again) way to pass along audio and video, it _could_ be wiser to develop plugins for MSN, ICQ, AIM and Yahoo to work with it rather than the other way around.

Remember, as long as we use their protocols, they are ahead of us. Yet, they can't change their plug-in infrastructure very fast without affecting their value to users.

I am also trying to find a good reason for an amicable fork (searching both my brain and the posts at /.). Shouldn't everybody work together? Maybe modularizing the structure a little more for the next major release could do the trick.

Re:Too many choices

[MikeFM]

How hard can it be? Just pop up your router, or whatever your firewall is, and set the ports you need open. It's hardly a protocols fault if you have a crappy firewall or don't know how to use it.

Not to say H.323 is wonderful.. I just don't see complexity as a sign of a bad protocol.

Re:Too many choices

[MikeFM]

SIP would be good too. Really, IMO, the more you can support the better. It's a shame none of these IM companies choose to set a public standard. It's great if they want to create a better protocol but it's not much use if it's not a public standard.

Re:Too many choices

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD FUD FUD Skype doesn't have spyware ya hoser.

Re:Too many choices

[pfleming]

"This service may be discontinued or become unavailable without warning any day. [OK?]".
And regularly does. And the protocol continues to be changed on the server to lock out these different clients. Work arounds by the developers are inconsistent. The latest GAIM on Win32 dumps my entire buddy list. The GAIM developers blame that on me using two different protocols to connect to ICQ from two different machines, actually blaming my Linux box for my Win box dumping my buddy list. The explaination doesn't make sense to me, but goes back to the companies running the servers changing the protocol to lock out clients that aren't running all those damned ads.

Re:Too many choices

[whoever57]

How hard can it be? Just pop up your router, or whatever your firewall is, and set the ports you need open.

If only it were so simple. H323 needs a full protocol-aware firewall, because it uses multiple data-streams with multiple ports. So the firewall needs to analyse the traffic and decide where to send the data that it receives from outside. Remember, with many firewalls, there is more than one machine behind it.

I wish...

[JThundley]

I just wish the devs would make something that they could be proud to call a 1.0 release.
But then again, this software is their gift to me, I have no room to bitch :)

Re:I wish...

[larley]

Well, that's the thing about open source. If you've got a problem with it, FIX IT!

Re:I wish...

[Erratio]

Yeah, all you'd need to do to solve that particular problem is somehow wrest control from the maintainer of the project or just convince him to change a decision which was made with a hell of a lot more meditation than some petty want. Open-source allows everyone to contribute, it doesn't allow people to stroll in and casually change the way things are done...why not just rename the project too, perhaps in your image. (This is all directed at the immediate parent, not the original message).

Re:I wish...

[scmason]

Are you missing the entire point of post? It is open source, you don't have to wrestle control from anyone. Just take it, fix it and use it. If your changes are useful, they will make it back into the product, or you can start your own fork.

Duh. ..

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

We won't have a 1.0 release. Our version number is just the previous number + 1, so a 1.0 just isn't going to happen :) Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

Re:I wish...

[RAMMS EIN]

Honestly, they should have called it 1.0 somewhere around 0.55. That version was stable and did everything it needed to do. The port to GTK2 should have been 2.x; I think the change is major enough to bump up the major version number.

Re:I wish...

[scmason]

Maybe you should chill just a little, think of what it is you need in a program and think of the best way to make it happen. If yu can not get a mechanic to fix your toyota the way that you want it, then you have to be resourceful and learn about cars so that you can make it happen yourself. If that is beyond you, maybe your neighbor knows a little and can help out. You have to be resourceful.

If you are having problems, and you want to make gaim work the way that you want, there are a ton of resources out there. So what if you can't program? Ask me and I will help. I am pretty damn good at that stuff. There is no need to direct so much anger at the world; it is a beautiful place.

The beauty of open source is that we can fix any problem that we want too. With other product, you are stuck. In fact, if you pulled the hood off you MSN messenger, like the toyota, and tried to modify it, you could go to jail.

Re:I wish...

[RAMMS EIN]

As evident by the grandparent's post, some people won't consider it stable until it's 1.0. And this one posts on /., think about all those folks who aren't familiar with open source.

Mozilla.org understood this very well and just named one of their releases 1.0, even though it definitely had bugs, missing features, and stability issues.

That said, we don't have to care what people think about Gaim. It's a great piece of software and works for us; if other people avoid it that's their problem.

By the way, was that a joke or do you guys _really_ have the policy to never release 1.0?

Re:I wish...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem with open source. You need a degree in computer science to use it.

Re:I wish...

[Anonymous Coward]

hey lighten up dude. the world is also a place where you can take something a little less than serious. yeesh

Re:I wish...

[westlake]

We won't have a 1.0 release. Our version number is just the previous number + 1, so a 1.0 just isn't going to happen :) Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0

That's a tough sell to the many folks who will not touch anything that doesn't suggest the maturity of a 1.0 release. The Linux kernel comes to mind, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP and many others.

Re:I wish...

[geckofiend]

ahhh so you're a non-conformist dev team eh? Let's just throw years of concvention out the window and confuse potential users just so we can be different. Fine decision making like that make me want to rush right out and try GAIM.

Re:I wish...

[pyr0]

I guess since I don't have a CS degree, I haven't been using open source at all for the past *seven* years. Oh wait...I have. I think your statement should have been, "That's the problem with open source. You need a brain to use it."

Just because one doesn't know how to program doesn't mean they can't assist developers in squashing bugs or in improving features.

Re:I wish...

[Anonymous Coward]

they are probably also a "we don't give fuck" dev team. Meaning "we don't give a fuck whether you use GAIM or not"

Re:I wish...

[Erratio]

Yeah, but he's not talking about a particular feature or bug that's bothering him. He's talking about the decision to change the major version number, that's something out of the realm of the majority of contributors.

Re:I wish...

[Erratio]

That's not exactly non-conformist. There are plenty of other projects which have permeated the linux community (and are very trusted in it) which have yet to reach version 1, most a lot older than GAIM (Sylpheed, Blackbox) and others which took a long time before making the change. Version numbers are more often a marketing thing than a programming one (which focuses more on revision or build numbers), and in projects which aren't after money, there's little point in worrying about it. It does seem like it would be a good step (maybe after v0.99) the way the project is maturing, though then maintaining stability and growth becomes a greater balancing act.

Re:I wish...

[p00p at instable.net]

Open Source? Are you some kind of communist??!

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

That's the current policy.

Re:I wish...

[ChipX86]

Non-conformist? Perhaps. How would you define a 1.0 release? How can we? Development on this program can never end, and what makes a 1.0 release is a matter of opinion only. If we did release a 1.0, we'd hear from so many people how it wasn't ready for one. There's no reason to. If people don't use gaim because of it, that's fine. We have plenty of people who do use it, but we're not in it for the popularity contest stuff. We're in it because we want a good IM client to use. Scratching an itch.

Re:I wish...

[AvantLegion]

What possible purpose does avoiding 1.0 intentionally serve?

Re:I wish...

[Boing]

But what about the "more eyes on the code" approach? I mean, even if only a tiny fraction of people care enough to delve into the inner workings, you would at least have more people trying to use the main program in different ways, and you'd find security holes and bugs more easily.

How would you define a 1.0 release? How can we?

1.0 is "the earliest release of the program that is stable enough, and featured enough, for general usage." Gaim hit that a while ago, but didn't label it so.

If you're not going to use that definition, which is essentially the standard one, then why have less-than-one version numbers at all? Why don't you label every build Gaim 04262004150548 (or whatever)? Less-than-one only serves to give people the impression that you're not ready for them to use Gaim yet, which isn't really true (I hope).

How useful is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now everybody can IM me and see all my pasty nakedness at the computer.

You have been warned.

Re:How useful is that?

[larley]

Thanks for the warning. I'll be sure never to IM ANYONE... It's like those people who put on a towel to answer the phone, but now when a message pops up and you're on thehun, you're screwed. ;)

Re:How useful is that?

[RAMMS EIN]

Not unless your webcam is supported... :-/

Re:Possible applications

[SCSi]

gaim uses nano-springs? Wow, and I thought it was just coded badly.

*ducks*

Re:Possible applications

[Teclis]

Hmm. This story was meant to go to the divinci story. Sorry.

good thing

[jangell]

The way I look at it, this could be a very good thing.. From what I've witnessed currently the gaim development team is busy with many things, and cannot focus on one or two certain features.

Now that It has forked off the developers that are interested in this will have the time to do the one thing they WANT to do, not a bunch of others.

The way I look at it, it is kind of like the introduction of the assembly line, a group will be very skilled at one task and not be working on and assembleing all the other features.

Quite frankly, This is one feature gaim is really lacking. With the introduction of broadband services in the home, video and voice is extremely popular.

It's hard to get someone to try linux when their main tasks cannot be performed.

This is a very good thing.

Re:good thing

[RAMMS EIN]

Of course, Linux has been able to do voice chat and video chat for a long time. I mean, there's speakfreely, rat, GnomeMeeting, ophone, etc, and you can serve streaming MPEGs or such, which is what I used to do.

Re:good thing

[LostCluster]

Of course, Linux has been able to do voice chat and video chat for a long time. I mean, there's speakfreely, rat, GnomeMeeting, ophone, etc, and you can serve streaming MPEGs or such, which is what I used to do.

Yes. However there's competiting formats for realtime video chat right now... and the so called "open standards" seem to be ignored. GAIM's point is to emulate the proprietary formats that haven't been released for Linux yet.

Re:good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose it's a good thing for some but please make it easy for people to disable this "feature" at compile-time when it rolls back into the main branch. Remember that some of us don't want an instant messaging program with the footprint of a media player as well!

I'm still ticked firefox isn't faster than netscape 4.7x, and that's the "lightweight" mozilla I freshly compiled with as few features as possible (i.e. none of this mathml nonsense). Last thing I need is my instant messaging software to get that bloated, too!

What next? text? Oh wait, emacs.

Re:good thing

[jsebrech]

Actually, MSN messenger uses SIP for its audio and video functionality, which IS an open format. It's just not supported in a way yet that will interoperate with a messenger client on linux.

And netmeeting uses open and standardised formats too, which is the whole reason gnomemeeting interoperates with windows.

Re:good thing

[jone1941]

actually SIP is simply a handshaking protocol and has absolutely nothing to do with video streaming. However, it allows for the handshaking of voice and video communication among other things. The reason it is not supported by any other clients is because they are not likely using a open standard for the communication of the stream after the sip connection is made. SIP is not the issue, it is the communication means that they are using that is the problem.

Re:Possible applications

[larley]

Well, I think it may conserve energy, but probably not much. Depends on the mechanism used. Maybe using the brake's friction combined with the potential energy of the spring would be a more prudent effort. But I think I would leave that to an engineer, not a biologist, like myself. ;)

Re:Possible applications

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like you're confused about the laws of thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines and such. look into it, it's good stuff.

iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[metalligoth]

Is it compatible with Apple's iChat AV / AIM's video and audio chatting?

If so, that would most certainly rule. iChat AV is awesome, but chatting on the Windows AIM client restricts one to a tiny window, whereas with iChat you can take up the whole screen if you want.

Also, I have lots of x86 using friends that hate booting into Windows from Linux just to use advertising-ridden AIM.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[RAMMS EIN]

``Is it compatible with Apple's iChat AV / AIM's video and audio chatting?''

That's the idea. However, an idea is all there is for now. AFAIK, all major IMs use proprietary protocols for voice and video that have not been reverse engineered yet.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ, as Apple stated when iChat AV was first introduced: iChat AV operates on the SIP standard to communicate audio/video signals. All you need after that is the codecs to encode and decode signals from any webcam.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[hak1du]

Also, I have lots of x86 using friends that hate booting into Windows from Linux just to use advertising-ridden AIM.

The ads are part of their business model. If lots of people switch to using open, ad-free clients, they'll eventually just decide to keep those clients from connecting. That's the trouble with using software that relies on proprietary protocols and proprietary servers.

I know it's less convenient, but try to get your friends to use chatting (in particular, video chatting) using open protocols. There are technically perfectly good choices: H.323, Jabber, etc. People just have to use them more. And the longer AIM becomes entrenched, the harder it will get to change.

Just imaging what E-mail would be like if it had started like chatting--with AOL, Microsoft, and a few others controling the servers and the infrastructure. Ultimately, ISPs should provide IM servers just like they provide mail servers.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[blizzy83]

"all major IMs use proprietary protocols for voice and video that have not been reverse engineered yet" last i heard ben affleck was pretty good at that stuff, so i dont really think its a question of how, but when

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Kent Recal]

There are technically perfectly good choices: H.323 [...]

*cough*
Please think again.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[ensignyu]

Jabber + voice chat would be awesome.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Gadzinka]

Don't know about iChat, but MSN Messenger uses completely interoperable SIP. I even used MSN Messenger as a client to access Free World Dial-up (FWD). Or was it Windows Messenger? Anyway, it was the client installed by default in Windows XP.

Robert

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[big.ears]

Email did not used to be as open as it is today. Although many academic and business systems were not much different, it was often a hassle to communicate between different systems. Even ten years ago, my college was using a system called "All-In-One", and to send something off campus, you had to prefix the address it with some bizarre code, because for some reason the computer couldn't figure it out otherwise. I think that some early internet services like compuserve and prodigy were even more disinterested in letting you email with people not on your system.

But, somewhat ironically, the ancestors of IM that we used at the time (unix talk and ytalk) were free, sans advertising, and used well-understood communication protocols. So as email has grown more open, chat tools have grown less so. But this is probably just because a lot of IM used in business/school is not officially sanctioned, and also not budgeted, so management is letting their employees pay (by looking at advertising) for an increasingly-important business infrastructure.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

last i heard ben affleck was pretty good at that stuff

Yeah, I heard J-Lo's a pretty hot coder too, when she's not shaking her booty..

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[fyonn]

MSN messenger does use SIP. I've used to to connect to a private sip server and talk to a cisco IP phone, and even, via a cisco router with dsp card, to a PSTN phone.

I don't know a massive amount about sip, does it take care of the text messaging as well as audio/video? if so, can one not get aim and msn to intercommunicate somehow? at the end of the day, most people want a big single unified IM network where they can use the account and client they prefer, and speak to all of their friends.

dave

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[hak1du]

Email did not used to be as open as it is today. Although many academic and business systems were not much different, it was often a hassle to communicate between different systems. Even ten years ago, my college was using a system called "All-In-One", and to send something off campus, you had to prefix the address it with some bizarre code, because for some reason the computer couldn't figure it out otherwise.

What does that have to do with it being open? Yes, we used to have UUCP, Bitnet, DECnet, ARPAnet, and lots more, and, yes, you had to concoct some pretty strange addresses. But most of those implementations were open, and people made at least an effort to keep them interoperable.

I think that some early internet services like compuserve and prodigy were even more disinterested in letting you email with people not on your system.

Of course, they were. But they lost out.

But, somewhat ironically, the ancestors of IM that we used at the time (unix talk and ytalk) were free, sans advertising, and used well-understood communication protocols. So as email has grown more open, chat tools have grown less so. But this is probably just because a lot of IM used in business/school is not officially sanctioned, and also not budgeted, so management is letting their employees pay (by looking at advertising) for an increasingly-important business infrastructure.

No, it has more to do with the technology, and the problem happened earlier. "talk" requires a constant internet presence and a fixed IP address to be useful, "mail" doesn't. In order to make "talk" work otherwise, you need global naming and directory services, but those weren't widely used or standardized by the time commercial ISPs started up. So, ISPs ended up providing mail service but not talk services.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

iChat uses SIP as well.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Wesley Felter]

Too bad Apple enbraced and extended SIP so that iChat AV doesn't interoperate with real SIP software.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[mujin]

at the end of the day, most people want a big single unified IM network where they can use the account and client they prefer, and speak to all of their friends.

Sounds a lot like Jabber

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[System.out.println()]

>Ultimately, ISPs should provide IM servers just like they provide mail servers.

Ever heard of a little thing called IRC?
If there were simpler clients out there, it would function almost flawlessly as an AIM replacement, and it's completely open.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[ameoba]

here are technically perfectly good choices: H.323

You've obviously never looked at or tried to implement an ITU protocol. Not only does getting an actual copy of any of their protocols cost a fair bit of money, they're all excessively complicated and rely on a large stack of other complex & expensive ITU protocols.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean by not letting me type in someone's IP and video chat that way? Yeah. I guess you have to be on my buddy list.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Jabber have voice and webcam support at all?

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there even a good H.323 client for OSX? I thought so.

Don't even mention Gnomemeeting. That's a monster to install on OSX. It requires a huge number of libraries and all sorts of crap. Give me a native(ish) app please.

Sure, there's the OpenH323 client for OSX but, bah, it sucks. Too hard to use and is different from the version on Linux (simph323 versus ohphone; hell practically none of the commands are the same).

Franky, I just have not seen a good, free, H.323 client for OSX. It doesn't exist as far as I know. iChat on the other hand does exist and it works fine plus it talks to AIM (video and all).

The problem is that I can't use AIM/Video on Linux... I really hope this GAIM-vv thing gets going good.

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Mizery De Aria]

Google should offer a text messaging service

Re:iChat AV / AIM Video Chat

[Anonymous Coward]

You have X86 using friends ?

There, you are out - this bullshit cannot go on like this.
Either you are one of us or you are not.

Uh oh...

[larley]

I just realized. Seeing as the true geeks use open source and all, that'll just give us one less reason to go out and be social... As soon as they develop a usb-automated back scratcher and/or fridge/microwave, I'm not leaving the house!

Re:Uh oh...

[flynns]

..you leave your house to scratch your back and cook/refrigerate your food?

hmm.

Re:Uh oh...

[RdsArts]

..you leave your house to... cook/refrigerate your food?

Of course they do. Doesn't everyone use off-site storage?

Re:Uh oh...

[evilviper]

Maybe he's living in a "Spider Hole".

They're in-vogue right now in New York. Been that way ever since Saddam's made them popular...

Re:Uh oh...

[golgafrincham]

enlighten me, what is a "spider hole" in ny?

GAIM UI

[BESTouff]

That's nice, I hope they'll take GnomeMeeting's UI as an example. Gaim'UI sucks big time : it has tons of windows opening for no reason, taking the focus (and the keyboard input) from what you were previously doing. Way too much intrusive if you ask me.

Re:GAIM UI

[FryGuy1013]

uncheck the raise windows on events and install the tray icon plugin then. I still like Trillian's UI better though.

Re:GAIM UI

[LostCluster]

Gaim'UI sucks big time : it has tons of windows opening for no reason, taking the focus (and the keyboard input) from what you were previously doing. Way too much intrusive if you ask me.

They're just trying to emulate AIM... That description makes it sound like they're getting that part right.

Re:GAIM UI

[RAMMS EIN]

Use the preferences, dude.

I personally thing Gaim has one of the _nicest_ UIs around. I group all chats and conversations in one tabbed window, so that I never have to worry about things popping up again.

Want chats in a separate window? Click the checkbox. Want every conversation in a separate window, but all chats in one tabbed window? It can be done. Pretty much any imaginable combination is possible.

Re:GAIM UI

[prockcore]

Gaim'UI sucks big time : it has tons of windows opening for no reason

What are you talking about? It has windows opening because people are sending you IMs.

By default, Gaim puts all chats into one tabbed window now. So actually there are only 2 windows, your buddy list, and your chats.

Compare this with iChat, which does indeed have the worst UI of any IM client. (If someone sends you an IM, you get that little notification window that pops up, and stays *ABOVE* all other windows until you hit Reply). iChat also doesn't have tabbed chat windows.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

When I start the program I get two windows. One is the reconmnect window and another is the buddy list (which arrives a few seconds later). Each morning I wait the few seconds before I can move the buddy list to workspace number 4. This is a small problem, but it is a daily nuisanse. (Other gnome programms do not work like this)

When my msn get disconnected for a few seconds I would like to avoid having a popup window at all. Or at least the popup should only appear after the first attempt to reconnect fails. How about adding a small icon to the smileys instead. This icon would tell the user that the connection is bad, but the client is still hoping to resolve the issue.

If my msn gets reconnected many times then I sometimes press the cancel button to avoid further attempts to reconnect. This button does not work (Debian/sid). The only way to avoid further reconnections is to go to the account window and disconnect everything.

I am grateful for the work that the gaim team does to make programs for us users, and I realize that I have no reason to bitch. I also note that the gui has improved a lot since they started following the gnome guidelines. As notec above the chats have improved a lot. Still I would advice them to change the behavior with respect to the popups.

Re:GAIM UI

[ratsnapple tea]

This is probably going to come off as another one of those annoying "leap to Apple's defense at all costs!" posts, but what the hell.

It's true that iChat's incoming IM windows pop up on top of all your other windows, but it's not a nuisance at all. It's ghosted out, for one thing, so you can tell it's not a "real" window, and it doesn't take focus away from anything else you're working on. If you want it to obey normal stacking order, just click on it (making it a "normal" window) and then click back on whatever you were working on. No problem. Intuitive. Easy.

I happen to think iChat's interface is actually the best of any client I've ever tried, but that's another matter...

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if you're using sawfish you can use the matched windows option to put all windows at a certain workspace!

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Any window which pops to the front and steals focus from the current window is bad UI design, plain and simple.

Re:GAIM UI

[00420]

It's true that iChat's incoming IM windows pop up on top of all your other windows, but it's not a nuisance at all.

While I don't doubt that it doesn't bother you, that would bug the hell out of me.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow that is brilliant. I will start installing at once :)

Re:GAIM UI

[gomoX]

You mean you don't have fluxbox's right click > remember > workspace? Best thing since sliced bread. Give it a try you won't go back.

Re:GAIM UI

[It'sYerMam]

Trillian had a brilliant UI. The default skin for non-pro had that little globe on it, which had access to all the features.

I personally don't use gaim, as the interface is clunky, and I only really use the MSN protocol. Consequently, I use aMSN, which hopefully will be getting a GTK makeover and support of voice/video chat, along with multi-protocol.
It has a UI basically like MSN's, but it is skinnable, uses TCL/TK, and can be configured to make it more space efficient. One thing I hated about the regular MSN was the sidebar in the chat-window - it took up far too much space whilst serving no purpose, and there is none in either trillian or aMSN :)

Re:GAIM UI

[Xabraxas]

Window Maker is better yet. You can choose to have a certain program only open in a certain workspace and then you can configure it so that all child windows will open in the same workspace as the parent, if you want.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be possible to write a gaim plugin that suppressed the "recconnect popup windows"?

Re:GAIM UI

[Henk Poley]

The ehm... 'interesting' thing is that this expected behaviour. I once filed a bug for it, not too long ago, and the GAIM devs dropped it because of that 'fact'.

btw, from KDE 3.2 works quite nice I must say, especialy with the universal sidebar hack installed. No need to wait for Microsoft Longhorn when Linux already has it.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to warn you that your post is slightly incomprehensible. What is interesting? Which bug did you file? Why was it dropped? What works in KDE? :)

Re:GAIM UI

[CAIMLAS]

But you can't avoid the "You've been disconnected" type messages. You can get 20+ of those fuckers popped up on your window in a couple hours with a bad connection.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Not with a recent version. Try updating before you bitch in a public forum.

Re:GAIM UI

[atallah]

This is a hidden preference in 0.77 (as part of the autoreconnect plugin).

You have to manually enable the pref in your prefs.xml.

In 0.78 it will be a checkbox in the autoreconnect plugin.

Re:GAIM UI

[BESTouff]

Nope, the preferences don't allow gaim to stop popping up the current chat window and stealing the focus. And when the DSL line disconnects/reconnects, that's a festival of windows just to tell gaim lost and found again the network. Pathetic.

Otherwise Gaim is great.

Re:GAIM UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Your right on the money, iChat sucks. Trillians UI blows as well. Give me Adium any day of the week.
-Rabid Mac User

Re:GAIM UI

[shadow_slicer]

That's nice if what you're doing is chatting, but what if you just want a client to run *politely* in the background until someone you know gets on.

GAIM doesn't do this. If someone pops up and says "hello," it pops up right in front of what you're working on and steals the focus from whatever you were doing. If there is a minor internet disruption and it loses the connection it pops up an error message and steals the keyboard focus from whatever you were doing. If you have auto-reconnect enabled, it will then leave the error message and attempt to reconnect: This means that if I accidentally leave it on while I'm at work I have about 50 message boxes greeting me when I get home -- and since they aren't all located in the same spot (since they just let the window manager place them instead of acting like error messages traditionally do and appearing in the middle of the screen), I have to move the mouse around to find the 'OK' button on each one.

The UI may be fine if GAIM is all you're doing, but I do not spend most of my time chatting, so its pushiness bothers me: its pushiness brings back painful repressed memories of a long-forgotten era when I was forced to deal with poorly designed windows apps that always default to putting shortcuts on the desktop, the quicklaunch bar, start menu, and Sendto, set their own "quick agent" to launch on startup *and* snagging all the file types it can from whatever I had previously set them. In short it ignores the fact that users may want to do something else with their computer besides using your "wonderful" program.

What GAIM (and any well designed application) needs to do is *never* steal the user's keyboard focus, and *never* pop up on top of what the user is doing. It can pop up windows around or behind what I'm doing. It can make (configurable) noises, but *do not* interfere with what I'm doing.

I just don't have patience with whiny programs that for some reason require a user decision every time the internet hiccups, or m@dCh1X0R_23 sends you a message (do you wish to accept?). I have better things to do than babysit my applications.

Gnomemeeting/Aim/Yahoo Video

[NitsujTPU]

I don't think that this represents any kind of competition at all.

You can't connect to cams via AIM/Yahoo with gnomemeeting/netmeeting.

It's a different program, with a different aim.

Re:Gnomemeeting/Aim/Yahoo Video

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a different program, with a different aim

Did you think that up ALL by yourself?

Re:Gnomemeeting/Aim/Yahoo Video

[Anonymous Coward]

If gaim-vv ends up being a succes, then I definitely hope that they will also implement the protocol that they use in netmeeting.

Re:Gnomemeeting/Aim/Yahoo Video

[Anonymous Coward]

The Win32 programs suck and are bloated. MSN runs in the background even when I tell not to do so. AIM sucks big time. I found Gaim to be much better and takes less resources than the other IM clients. For Voice chat, Speak Freely is still my choice; the only one which comes close is MS Portrait. Since Speak Freely had the EOL announcement, I have been waiting for a decent alternative OSS client. Hopefully this would be it.

But what about making direct connect work?

[Qinopio]

I like Gaim, I use it myself... but wouldn't it be better to fix the existing issues and give it certain areas of functionality that MiddleMan or MyIM have, before getting into this whole new can of worms?

Re:But what about making direct connect work?

[black mariah]

Yes, which is the reason for the fork. One part of the team concentrates of voice and video, the other concentrates on the other stuff.

Re:But what about making direct connect work?

[BubbleNOP]

I agree with you. I've been regularly trying gaim out and am yet to have any successful direct AOL IM connections in either Linux or Windows... and it is embarassing to have to answer to surprised contacts that it doesn't work because "i'm in linux, using gaim".

Recent problems with Gaim

[cerberusss]

We use Gaim to communicate with the offshore part of the team and I have to say I couldn't really miss it. But I did have to, since they didn't react to the changes that Yahoo required from clients. It took a looooong time (almost three months) for Gaim to get fixed. Although we use Yahoo's network, Yahoo's own Linux client doesn't run in Xinerama (multihead) mode. The last six weeks, an unofficial patch floated around which had its own problems but at least a connection was made. Only this week, a new release was done which solved all problems.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mkamp]

If you want a closed group like for team communication, why don't you go for jabber? You could setup your own server in seconds (at least with debian: apt-get install jabber), have your own rooms and don't have to bother too much about the internet and firewalls.

It is truly open source. That includes the protocol, most client-apis, most clients and most servers.
Furthermore the core is already in IETF RFCs.

No need to worry about vendors checking the protocols anymore and a wide variety of clients to use.

Watch out, your favorite IDE might even get a plug-in for IMing.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[cerberusss]

If you want a closed group like for team communication, why don't you go for jabber?

It's a good idea, BUT... We're at the customer site behind a firewall. The offshore team is on our company network, which doesn't have a net connection at all except for a HTTP proxy. Where would I want to set up a server?...

Yeah VPN blahblah but due to fscking corporate inertia this took a LONG time and only then it was figured out that it was too darn slow from India to Europe. Bizarre huh?

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[RAMMS EIN]

It nicely illustrates the pitfalls of using proprietary formats/protocols. If you had used IRC or Jabber there wouldn't have been a problem.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mkamp]

Tough, there is an option with HTTP-polling and jabber across an HTTP-proxy though, but I never tried that.

Anyway, the VPN shouldn't be to slow. That data exchanged is not hughe and the frequency of message is also low. Furthermore using the VPN the connections wouldn't need to be re-established for every message, so I would guess that connection speed doesn't matter.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[jsebrech]

Jabber is nice, but I gave up on it for two reasons:

- The msn plugin, crucial to me since everyone I know is on that network, never worked quite right. Either it was outright broken, or unstable.

- Every single jabber client is horrible UI-wise. The whole nomenclature is needlessly obfuscated. "Signing up for transports" ? What the hell is that? The whole transport scheme seems poorly thought out UI-wise, no matter how well-designed it is technologically.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mkamp]

I understand your concerns.

Jabber does have a different philosophy. The clients can just do the Jabber protocol. It is the server, that adds the capability to talk to other networks and it does that in quite some generic way.
So basically this makes it much easier to provide a client implementation.

Still it might be, that if you want to talk to people on the M$ network, that it is not the best solution for that. But for the original case, to connect developers working in different locations, it seems great to me and am using it every day just to do so.

As it is so easy to use and extend jabber we have lots of bots around that help us automate our tasks, e.g. we have a bot telling us when the build failed or succeeded. We're just talking about a handful of lines of code.

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[mikecron]

Forget Jabber's tranports. Just use Gaim (or Kopete, etc), and add in your Jabber account. Then you can also add your MSN/ICQ/Yahoo account - and it's very stable!

Re:Recent problems with Gaim

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe.. If you follow this approach your Jabber buddy list will be empty, or at least all the people on your Jabber buddy list will also be reachable through icq/aim/msn. Of course the empty Jabber buddy list will still add to your ubergeek value.

I really like the idea of Jabber, but It seems to me that they should have cards differently. Instead of spending a lot of energy on transports they could have looked for a fancy features that the other networks did not have. This way it would be easier from me to convince myself that I should not to disable my Jabber account an my gaim client.

another fork?

[master0ne]

and this makes how many forks of gaim now? lets see we have gaim, ayttm, everybuddy, and gaim-vv, are there any im missing? sounds like a poll to me... "whats your favorite linux messanger client? aim, yahoo, ayttm, everybuddy, gaim, gaim-vv, cowboy neal's all-in-one messanger. ytalk, or i dont chat you insensitive clod!"

anyway in all seriousness ayttm (are you talking to me) look it up on freshmeat (as im too lazy/tired to link it) already has rudimentry yahoo webcam support, however it is still lacking, i loved trillian for windows, and would like to see gaim go in that direction, with all the eyecandy and skins and plugins... i know, ill learn c and fork gaim myself!!

Re:another fork?

[RAMMS EIN]

I may be wrong, but AFAIK ayttm is a everybuddy fork and everybuddy is not based on the Gaim codebase. They are very similar, though. Traditionally, eb has had the features and Gaim the stability. I wish they would cooperate more...

Re:another fork?

[Kent Recal]

Don't forget naim. It's great for us console junkies!

Re:another fork?

[geminidomino]

I liked naim a lot. I dumped it awhile back for irssi+bitlbee, but for the life of me, I can't remember why. Maybe it was the whole Yahoo fracas...

Re:another fork?

[camh]

The word fork is being a bit overused lately because some high profile projects have forked recently.
This is not a fork of gaim - since it is planned to merge the changes back into gaim, it is just a branch. Branches are quite common when you want to add substantial features to a program, because it isolates those new features from the mainline until it is ready, and development of minor features can continue on the mainline.
You can call it a fork if you want, but I think that is just sensationalising what is just a development branch.

Re:another fork?

[Uerige]

While we're at it, centericq! centericq! centericq!

Re:another fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

CenterICQ? I'll never get used to that *cough*braindead*cough* UI.

Re:another fork?

[master0ne]

hehe, yeah i love naim, ive been meaning to get around to installing it on my box so when im ssh'ed into my box from elseware, i can still chat localy from my box :D

Re:another fork?

[BluesMoon]

ayttm isn't so much a fork of everybuddy - it *is* everybuddy. What is now called everybuddy (eb-lite) is a complete rewrite. Ayttm is around to provide users with a workable client until eb-lite matures.

Re:another fork?

[BluesMoon]

remind me to finish my article on the history of universal instant messengers.

Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exciting news indeed.

Gaim is the only decent AIM client for I've run across for Windows - the official client is utter crap, and Trillian is bloated payware. Still, some of my less-technically-inclined friends refuse to use Gaim, citing the fact that it doesn't have enough cool features and "bling bling". With cool new features like these, I have more ammunition in my battle to get people to switch ;p

Now, if only the Gaim folks would get their act together on MSN support ...

Re:Woot!

[rlangis]

Gaim is the only decent AIM client for I've run across for Windows - the official client is utter crap, and Trillian is bloated payware.

I stopped using Trillian when they went to the pay model. I then tried to go all-linux on the desktop, but found that my EQ addiction could not be curbed, and had to return to Windows for that...and Gaim for Windows then became my IM client of choice.

Now, if only the Gaim folks would get their act together on MSN support ...

Not sure what you're meaning here though, I've been able to chat with my MSN buddies for quite some time. 0.76 fixes MSN. Er, well...if only. I mean it *works* now...and most of the problems with 'support' aren't on the Gaim Devs side - that's all MSN/Y!/AIM folks breaking the protocol *again*.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you're meaning here though, I've been able to chat with my MSN buddies for quite some time. 0.76 fixes MSN. Er, well...if only. I mean it *works* now...and most of the problems with 'support' aren't on the Gaim Devs side - that's all MSN/Y!/AIM folks breaking the protocol *again*.

Good point, the support is there, and it DOES work, however, I find the whole process of managing your buddy list, user names (email address) vs display names, and so on, very counterintuitive. I'm not sure what's wrong with it, the UI just seems to confuse things rather than help.

I'm sure if I played around with it for awhile, I'd get the hang of it, but I'm talking about converting non-tech people here. If I, a linux guy, have problems with the UI, I don't expect that giggle-headed teenage girls will fare much better.

On a side note, it's nice to see that the system log is back in 0.77. When I tell people about Gaim, the one feature that seems to hold almost universal appeal is the fact that you can use the system log to "spy on people" and see how often they come online :)

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

well, this is certainly should be modded "Opinion" and not anything nearing fact...

I installed Gaim for W32 just a few minutes ago. I had installed in a while back and figured it must have gotten better. It had! I was actually impressed with the look and feel that it had.

Unfortunately it certainly wasn't on par with the official Windows client I regularly use...

The client doesn't have a buddy list that starts left justified in the window. There is a large gap between the left side and where the buddy list starts. That means I have to increase the size of the window to stop it from putting a side to side scrollbar at the bottom of the buddy list window. I like AIM to be open all the time and taking up a small piece of screen real estate. Seems like a UI bug to me.

While it does have a feature to show buddy icons in the buddy list area I could certainly do without that. Problem is, when you disable that the font size of the buddy list names becomes really small. I don't need to squint. Why does the size change? On a related note, why are there very large pictures next to the names on the list? I don't need poster sized notifications of how people are signed on. Should be an option to disable that. Seems like a UI bug to me.

It has a lot of settings that are and are not set by default that should be. Want to succeed in the Windows world? Make it user friendly out of the box.

I have to enable a plug-in to control it from the taskbar. Windows users aren't exactly into fooling around with their settings that much. Make it easy out of the box.

During setup there are a lot of options about GTK+/etc. I know what they mean... Windows users will not. Make it easy to understand (either with details or just completely hidden).

I was overly displeased with the client. I certainly believe that the parent was a free software supporter that can't see past the fact that AOL wants to use ads.

Ads on the client don't bother me and they shouldn't bother you. They aren't as intrusive as the oversized buddy list window you need to have to fit all the text in the window without a scroll bar.

YMMV.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Miranda IM is hands down the best Windows IM client. I know you've probably settled in to gaim but seriously you should give it a shot.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried Miranda (as I had tried GAIM). Miranda wouldn't even load my buddy list when I started the program.

If I couldn't figure out how to sign on and have a buddy list supported from the server (even after enabling the function that was disabled by default) I can't imagine how anyone else would want to use the software.

You should start the program. Say you want to use AIM. Enter your login/password and be shown your buddy list.

Miranda is not all that great.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

umm, EQ plays perfectly on linux, just get winex, transgaming.com baby! it got a 4 out of 5 playablity, with some minor annoyances, but it works great on my box.

Re:Woot!

[B2382F29]

Disable "Display Buddy Icons" and the Icons will become small. I personally never cared about "Buddy Icons".

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously you cannot comprehend what you are reading. The post said when you disable the buddy icons the font size shrinks and makes it so that you have to squint.

Re:Woot!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just went and tested, and at most there is a 1 point change in font size when switching modes, but it really looks like no change, just the illusion of having the text next to a huge image comparted to the text next to a small image.

Also, when I compare my gaim window with my AIM window, the gaim window shows quite a few more people in the same ammount of space. (Also gaim stores ICQ and MSN contacts, if I were using AIM I'd have to have 3 different clients running, taking up a ton more space if I were to keep them all open.) If you really want to complain about gaim taking up desktop space, you really should complain about that huge ad at the top of the aim window. And as far as that not being annoying, what about the ads that contain audio? One day my roommate leaves the room and leaves his speakers on (rather loud apparently). Ten seconds after he's gone, an audio ad on his aim client plays, very loudly I might add. For about fifteen seconds. Tell me that sort of thing isn't annoying.

Re:Woot!

[phre4k]

What is wrong with msn in gaim? I have been using it for several months, both on linux and on windows.

Re:Woot!

[/dev/trash]

Trillian is full of spyware? Explain?

Re:Possible applications

[Mnemennth]

*Sticks a fork in SCSI's duck* Hmmm... I think it's done...

How high can a duck with nano-springs in his feet jump, anyhow?

Ooops... please forgive me. I've had little sleep and my associations have become rather loose of late...

Mnem
*Toddles off to find something that's actually USER-FRIENDLY*

Re:Perhaps..

[scmason]

Maybe you don't need to talk to anyone that uses MSN and they, being much wiser than the rest of us knew this already. BTW complainer, what have you contributed lately? ..

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about forking time!

Re:Perhaps..

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you don't need to talk to anyone that uses MSN and they, being much wiser than the rest of us knew this already.

Or perhaps they're just zealots like you. A lot of people use MSN, and there's a lot to like about the service.

BTW complainer, what have you contributed lately? ..

I develop other open source software such as content management systems. I also contribute to gaim by using it and submitting useful bug reports when I have a problem.

Oh, by the way, the gaim developers don't want to support MSN not because the protocol is lousy or the network is unimportant, but because MSN is related to Microsoft. That's zealotry at its worst. Maybe if the developers were busy making a better product instead of forking and bashing Microsoft, gaim might be a lot farther along in development than it is now.

Since there is absolutely no information...

[Monkelectric]

Does anyone know what voice/video protocols? They should really start by implementing Yahoo/AIM/MSN yahoo and voice functions, if they are going to further fracture the way-too-many-standards-already arena of instant messenger video ... its a waste of their time.

I think libyahoo2 already has voice/video implemented, but GAIM uses an older library.

Re:Since there is absolutely no information...

[hak1du]

if they are going to further fracture the way-too-many-standards-already arena of instant messenger video

That's exactly the trouble: AIM, Yahoo! IM, and MSN Messenger are not "standards", they are commercial services. If they were standards, then implementing them would be much less of a problem.

However, there are standards for audio and video conferencing, and GnomeMeeting implements them, along with NetMeeting, iChat, and lots and lots of other software and hardware. People just need to be smart enough to figure out that they should use it.

Re:Since there is absolutely no information...

[Monkelectric]

That's exactly the trouble: AIM, Yahoo! IM, and MSN Messenger are not "standards"

I'll give you that :) However libyahoo2 supports cams so thats a freebee. Start with the freebee right? :)

Skype?

[ggvaidya]

For Windows, Skype is a really good over-internet voice chat program. It uses P2P, and the quality you get is really good (atleast if your friend is on a LAN :P, haven't tried it outside the college LAN yet). Version 0.97 is showing some problems. Still, something like this would be really cool on Linux ...

Re:Skype?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll second this. Skype is good for latency and sound quality. I've had skype conference calls die on me though for no apparent reason.

Re:Skype?

[ChiralSoftware]

Skype for Linux is on its way, and it can't be here soon enough for me. If you look on their site in the jobs section, they are looking for a Linux/QT programmer. Older versions of Skype ran under Wine, but apparently they are now doing some code relocation/decryption thing that breaks with Wine, so we just have to wait for the official Linux client. And if it's Qt, it will look good and integrate nicely with Suse 9.1 which is also almost here...

----------
Create a WAP server

Re:Skype?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some nice features of Skype that no other product has.
Always online, no central server or database.
Goes trough any gateway, firewall or proxy.
You cannot only set up calls behind a firewall but also recieve them, even connections between two or more firewalled persons.
All data is Public key encrypted.
It only uses 4kB bandwith while talking.

Re:Skype?

[neglige]

To me, the P2P aspect is the true killer feature of Skype. All you have to do is to install the software, register an account, and you're good to go.

We've installed Skype on a number of boxes, worked every time so far, and the quality is really good (even outside LAN).

The drawback is that - according to the FAQ - Skype uses a proprietary protocol :( And after the beta, certain (yet unnamed) add-on features will cost money.

I, for one, like Skype and I am waiting for the Linux client so I can start skyping (will "to skype" become a verb like "to google"?) again.

And, yes, I am aware ICQ offered voice chat years ago :)

Re:Skype?

[mobby_6kl]

Works fine for me on my 512/128 DSL. NAT doesn't seem to be a problem. But careful, 3-way conferencing sucks out much more bandwidth that I could afford.

Re:Skype?

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be better on Linux, since the Windows version of Skype is loaded with spyware.

Homepage says: Friendly fork which will backported

[Anonymous Coward]

The project page of gaim-vv says

A friendly fork of Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net) to concentrate on video and voice support, which will eventually be backported.

Was I the only one to follow the link?

Please be advised

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a Windows user, you should be using Miranda.

Thank you for your time.

Good News...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any project deadlines or time schedules announced... Looks like I can start going back to gaim...

iChat uses H.263

[FreeHeel]

from Apple:

iChat AV uses the industry-standard H.263 video codec and advanced pre- and post-processing techniques to deliver picture-perfect video. It uses the sophisticated technologies built into QuickTime to compress the video and audio while maintaining rich detail, natural colors, and smooth video over any 100-Kbps or faster Internet connection. Specific technologies include:

• Spatial anisotropic diffusion to maintain edge detail and sharpness while reducing unnecessary digital "noise."
• Temporal noise reduction to average out noise between video frames while avoiding motion blurring.
• Post-filtering of the received video to avoid blockiness and ringing artifacts.

iChat AV uses a sophisticated digital audio codec to deliver the same crystal-clear audio quality that you expect when you use a typical landline telephone. The fullduplex technology built into iChat AV lets you have natural conversations, just as with the advanced speakerphones found in conference boardrooms. Most other solutions force users to talk one at a time, providing an experience more akin to talking on a CB radio.

Apple has recently announced support for H.264, which is a good thing

Re:iChat uses H.263

[fdobbie]

And the negotiation is at least partially based on SIP, which is also an open standard. However there's still some proprietary glue sitting on top that goes over the AIM network that would have to be figured out.

Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[ZeekWatson]

Hopefully this fork will have a nicer dev team than plain Gaim. At the URL below you can see how the Gaim lead introduces himself to the Gentoo dev team by insulting Gentoo users and basically making an ass of himself. It goes something like:

As Gentoo users are generally an annoying nusiance in my IRC channel...

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35890

Best that could be expected from an AOL employee I guess!

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[lorien420]

Clearly you never spent any time in the #gaim irc channel. Before .60 went out of the door, Gentoo offered a gaim-cvs which had many many bugs. This is because they were using a cvs version of gaim. These people would use this and then go to #gaim to complain about it not working, often many times an hour. This created MASSIVE amounts of frustration, because the Gentoo users had absolutely no clue about anything involving gaim's cvs development of .60.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[lintux]

I'm very sorry to say, just can't resist, but you're just confirming their point here, it seems. Gaim has nothing to do with AOL, and certainly none of the Gaim developers work for AOL.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Anonymous Coward]

.. but Gentoo users are a generally annoying nuisance anywhere!

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[dot-magnon]

Strictly, gentoo users are the people with strange CFLAGS and funny errors, and they file bugs without thinking of their extremely unsupported compiler optimisations, just because they want the thing to go a *little* bit faster. What's the point?

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience Gentoo users have absolutely no clue about anything... but they are so 31337!

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Queuetue]

In general, the #gaim regulars are a bunch of jackasses. The latest stable, .76 has an annoying bug where if notifies you and asks for a response in the event that it needs to reconnect. This in turn raises problems with metacity, which gives focus to any new window, and now reconnection, instead of being something that happens magically behind the scenes by magic, is a 20-second clickfest of annoyance popups, randomly interrupting work.

Mentioning this topic (or any other user-centric topic) in #gaim will get you kicked pretty quickly .

I say the more forks (although this does not appear to be a fork) the better - there are several user-centric forks of GAIM, and hopefully one of them will stick.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[lorien420]

It's spelled: 1337

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[diegocgteleline.es]

"As Gentoo users are generally an annoying nusiance in my IRC channel, I would like to be able to set a +b on *!gentoouser@*, in order to keep them out. In order to accomplish this, I would like Gentoo to set the default username to something Gentoo specific. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Join an IRC channel 2. Wait for a Gentoo user to come in, talk about how he "emerged" this and that and all the "optimizations" he used, but something still isn't working 3. Mention that he should have read the FAQ before /joining and /kick him." I wish I could do the same in my channels. I'm tired of hearding "gentoo is 200% faster" "It eats less memory" (how on earth can optimizations make a program eat a noticeable amount of memory - if anything they're usually bigger because of the loop unrolling). They never show numbers though.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[rizzo]

Mentioning this topic (or any other user-centric topic) in #gaim will get you kicked pretty quickly .

WRONG. Joining the channel and whining and flooding like you did (yes I remember) will get you muted or kicked.

I mention user problems in #gaim every day and I don't get kicked. That's because I'm not a whiny selfish ass like you were those couple of days.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Queuetue]

Actually, I generally leave before they kick me - I leave at the threat, and it's been considerably more than a few days. But thanks for remembering - maybe that means #gaim is starting to actually pay attention to what actual people actually want.

I do find it a little amazing that you find user problems in gaim every day - how broken is it? Or maybe you're just some fanboy twit making up stories. It's hard to say.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[rizzo]

I don't find user problems every day. I mention them in terms of their validity and possible solutions. Much different that your whiny tantrum.

I'm a distro maintainer so I deal with user issues.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[Queuetue]

Oh, it's fanboy twit. Gotcha.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[otis wildflower]

What, arch hints and -O3 is _that_ unusual?

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[rizzo]

Since you're now trolling on par with your IRC skillz, I'll say good day to you.

Re:Gaim dev team comprised of losers

[xmuskrat]

Stop whining, you selfish ass.

what are my options right now

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what are my options for voice and video chat on Linux right now? Are there any webcams that are supported by stock Linux kernels? I don't want to have to recompile my kernel, just want to plug it in and have it work like in Windows...

Re:what are my options right now

[LichP]

A good number of USB webcams should work out of the box if you're running a decent stock kernel from your distro (i.e. suitable modules are pre-compiled and ready to use). Others have binary drivers only. Unfortunately there is no USB device class for video devices, so webcam implementation is probably not as solid as most linux USB support. A detailed list of supported devices can be found at http://www.linux-usb.org/devices.html

competiton

[diakka]

From what I know of these two programs, They really do seperate things. It seems more reasonable that there would be more cooperation than competition. There's no point in reinventing the wheel if you can avoid it.

Maybe it would be better to announce this...

[Nuclear_Loser]

when they have a website! It's kind of jumping the gun when all you have to link to is a sourceforge project page.

Re:Maybe it would be better to announce this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you were kidding.

http://gaim.sf.net/

win32 client appears broken

[theguywhosaid]

i got an interesting dll loading error on winXP SP1.
it involved some long proc name in a dll and gaim.dll gave error 127. anybody know whats up?

Re:win32 client appears broken

[Yusaku Godai]

No idea, but perhaps you should report that to them.
Are you sure you have the latest version of the GTK+ runtime for windows? Gaim 0.77 needs GTK+ 2.2.4 rev c.

Re:win32 client appears broken

[Yusaku Godai]

Gah! I'm a bit drnk*Q. Sorry.

Re:win32 client appears broken

[bailout911]

Uninstall your old gtk runtime, install the new runtime. REBOOT. Unfortunately, you cannot skip this last step. At least that's what fixed it for me.

Fork vs. Branch

[RichiP]

When is a project forked? And when is it a branch? With the way forking is played in newssites nowadays, it seems to connote a difference of opinions and therefore the need to go separate ways. Most of the time, however, code is just branched in order to perform some development on a particular feature with the intent to merge the two branches together eventually.

The question in my mind is: what were the circumstances for the creation of the new source tree? Was it a branch (in which case the term amicable shouldn't even be used as that's what branches normally are without the need to SENSATIONALIZE it)?

Gaim-vv

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaim-vv is really more of an offsite branch of Gaim than a fork.

From the sf project page:
A friendly fork of Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net) to concentrate on video and voice support, which will eventually be backported

Basicly, I wrote a patch based on some code from libyahoo2 for Gaim to allow viewing other people's webcams. Filamoon independently had done some on msn voice and video related stuff. We decided to start a separate sourceforge project so we could collaborate and stuff.

Eventually we hope to merge it into Gaim proper. Currently it's in a state where it may be useful to users, but not in a state where it can be merged into Gaim. It breaks the core/ui split for example. It uses threads for some things. There's not really any shared code between the Yahoo! and MSN related features yet.

There are no AIM, iChat, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, etc, video or voice features. Someone wishing to work on that should contact us and start coding.

I don't consider gaim-vv to be in competition with any other project, GnomeMeeting or otherwise.

Gaim finally out-features CuSeeMe after 10+ years!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the best of times...
http://www.rocketcharged.com/cu-seeme/

Seriously, why did this take so long?
Don't flame me, I don't mean why did it take so long for this to happen with Gaim specifically, I mean in general. No IM software that I have tried seems to have outdone the early versions of CuSeeMe...

This is not a fork.

[Craig Davison]

It's a branch of the project with AV support. A fork is an entirely new project set off in a new direction from the original codebase. Branches are often created and merged in a development cycle.
</rant>

wrong project

[pdamoc]

this shouldn't have been a fork in Gaim but rather a joint venture between developers of IM software to create a library or a set of libraries that will handle the voice and video protocols, this way all the IM software would have benefit.

Re:wrong project

[stefanvt]

Exactly, as Gaim has plugin support why not do a plugin for a/v ?

Adium?

[Kethinov]

It would be nice if the work done in this forked project could be eventually integrated into Adium, seeing as how it's based off of GAIM's source. My one regret of switching from iChat to Adium is it's lack of "vv". So if I want to do some "vv" I have to switch back to iChat.

Re:Adium?

[piscoBandito]

If it finds its way into libgaim, then I'm sure it'll find its way into Adium... and any other AIM client that uses libgaim.

It's hardly a huge priority (there are many more pressing issues we have to deal with first -- think file transfer and direct IM's). But if it's successful and found it's way into libgaim, you'll probably see it in many other clients - including Adium.

Trillian is crap?

[antdude]

I disagree. I like Trillian (v0.74h -- free version) more than Gaim and I don't think it is crap. It's nice. If Trillian didn't exist, I would use Gaim. I wished Trillian existed for MacOS X and Linux natively.

Not everyone's

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Everyone's favorite instant messenger, Gaim...

I guess not Everybuddy can please everyone!

Smart ass...

not at all the same thing

[hak1du]

GnomeMeeting provides standards-based (H.323 and others) video conferencing, the same protocol that is used by many hardware video conferencing system. There are open server implementations that work with GnomeMeeting (e.g., openh323.org). You get full control over your data, your privacy, your CODECs, and your security. And using GnomeMeeting can be as simple as giving the host name of your counterpart.

The "chat" video conferencing add-ons from AOL, Yahoo!, etc., on the other hand, are tied into a proprietary server infrastructure. Using them means that you are becoming dependent on that server infrastructure and that you let those companies control when and how you can use their chat facilities. For example, AOL could just decide to shut down their servers, exclude you from it, or change the way they encode audio or video.

GAIM is, of course, multi-protocol. So, if the GAIM video chat effort does its job right, you should end up with an application that can subsume GnomeMeeting functionality while also giving you access to the proprietary chat networks. But you should always remember that using AIM or Yahoo! for video (just like for chatting) means that you can lose the service at any time, in particular when you are using an open source client to connect.

Re:not at all the same thing

[jsebrech]

The "chat" video conferencing add-ons from AOL, Yahoo!, etc., on the other hand, are tied into a proprietary server infrastructure.

Actually, most of them use SIP in a peer to peer fashion. There's no server dependancy with SIP.

Re:not at all the same thing

[hak1du]

Actually, most of them use SIP in a peer to peer fashion. There's no server dependancy with SIP.

Oh? So, how do I use AIM to do peer-to-peer video conferencing, completely separate from any AOL servers?

As I was saying, they are tied into a proprietary server infrastructure; that doesn't mean that every packet goes through the server.

i'm the one

[radoni]

supposed to be adding video transmit support for y! webcam. my computers (yes plural) recently had a meltdown of some kind. don't hold your breath.

those who are interested, i'm sure the help would be welcomed. scope is video and voice. contact marv (#gaim / freenode)

of note is the libj2k completely GNU GPL jpeg2000 library implementation, which avoids the questionably-incompatible licensing and free-as-in-freedom issues of libjasper.

there's a lot of msn/linphone work in there too.

for those of you have worked on patching Direct IM images to work again, gaim-vv would be the place to get that committed. hint, hint.

cheers.

Re:i'm the one

[atallah]

You are correct that libj2k avoids jasper's licensing issues, howeverm i'd just like to point out that it isn't GPL, rather it is released under a (GPL compatible) BSD license.

gaim-vv's modified libj2k will probably be released under a GPL license in the future, but currently, it is under the original license.

Re:i'm the one

[Wizard Drongo]

Have you heard of the Gyach Enhanced client? The guy developing won't take help, and is a total mong, but he's managed to get webcam support for Yahoo in it. Certainly recieving anyway. Don't know about transmit, since my webcam no worky worky in linux. He also claimed to have voice, although he seemed to be using some really shitty python based audio driver that I never heard of and won't compile properly, and he said he on't go to ALSA because he likes this udio plugin. But nonetheless, it's not too shabby as a first attemp, and best of all it's GPL, so you can take some of the code as a framework to move on from. Gyach-Enanched is on sourcefourge; do a google as it's on a sub-project page for some paint program the mong is writing. Goog luck, e-mail me if yo think I can help (I can't program at all though) at wizard_drongo@yahoo.co.uk

Of course voice and video is great...

[dawg ball]

... but is this just and indication of how lazy we are getting? Will the keyboard eventually become obsolete?

Re:Of course voice and video is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

You've obviously forgotten you're on slashdot :)

who starts complaining?

[Anonymous Coward]

with only these few gaim forks, lots of people already complained and bitched.

and we thought it was a good idea to open source java (yeah right). how many forks of java do you think there will be?

ah, wonderful...

[boola-boola]

This is one feature I've been waiting for. Hopefully it will be compatible with iChat AV, since that is my main method of voice chatting over the internet.

However, to be honest, I think the one feature GAIM _really_ needs is multithreading. For instance, when I've got multiple windows open, and one (or multiple ones) are using the gaim-encryption plugin, all the other windows/conversations have to wait for _one_ conversation to finish decrypting/encrypting the message before the rest will continue. It's highly annoying, and since most networking libraries are inherently multithreaded, it doesn't seem like it should be a problem. I'm hoping someone can put that in, soon, as I'm pretty sure it will alleviate some of GAIM's performance issues as well. Hell, I can even help debug the threading on the code level, if someone is willing to start a fork. ;-) (hint hint)

OpenSSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it work with openssl, or the developers are still _that_ dumb?

Re:OpenSSL

[abdulla]

OpenSSL has a license that's been made specifically incompatible with the GPL from what I've heard, that's why GAIM can't use it.

Stable?

[prandal]

GAIM for Windows has been plagued with stability problems from 0.74 onwards, with the MSN protocol being unusable (unless you like GAIM crashing out when people message you). Fortunately, it seems to be fixed in the 0.77 release.

Re:Stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell was the point of that post?

Re:Homepage says: Friendly fork which will backpor

[bonch]

Uh, Gaim and GnomeMeeting are two different projects. Read what I was quoting and referring to.

Since I run Debian...

[Glowing Fish]

Since I run Debian, I should read Slashdot from a year or so ago, to read about all the latest programs I can apt-get.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[ocelotbob]

debian stable is like that, but that's because it is designed to be just that, rock stable. Debian unstable or testing, however, are pretty current; unstable's got 2.6.5 and everything now.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[Blackknight]

Or you could switch to testing/unstable and run the latest stuff.

I run Sarge on my workstation at work and it is rock solid.

Re:Since I run Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is a problem for you, then you should upgrade to testing or install a different distribution that suits your needs. Debian stable was not made for people like you, so don't complain.

The newest version of gaim is in unstable, and you can use it with testing.

long live speak-freely

[nadaou]

FY [slightly OT] I,

There's a mature VOIP multi-platform already out there. Now under new management, but still Free.

Speak-Freely

linux/unix \ MS windows

It rocks. Much lighter than GnomeMeeting, but full featured multi codec + strong encryption.

Linux people get be sure to get the Tcl/Tk GUI...

Reverse-engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you tell us how you intend to reverse engineer the proprietary protocols and patented codecs used by ICQ, and MSN these days for example?

I see you are basing your work on linphone, for SIP support, but do you know that recent versions of MSN do not use SIP anymore?

If you plan to create something that will work from gaim to gaim only, then why not cooperate with the GnomeMeeting developers instead of trying to compete with them? Shouldn't Open Source be based on collaboration instead of competition?

Re:Reverse-engineering?

[shaitand]

"Shouldn't Open Source be based on collaboration instead of competition?"

Only in the sense that if this protocol is superior to that of gnomemeeting then it's open source and gnomemeeting can adopt it.

There is nothing wrong with honest and fair competition, and what's more honest and fair than the winner only staying that way by actually continuing to innovate in the future.

There are a number of reasons they may not want to collaborate with GnomeMeeting. Maybe the GnomeMeeting chaps are a pain in the arse to deal with. Maybe they feel the GnomeMeeting protocol sucks arse and feel an entirely different protocol is in order.

Who can say, there's nothing wrong with competition in open source. Competition is how you end up with something better. Lack of competition is how you end up with an antiquated XFree86.

Only Source Available

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no Win32 builds yet.

Although there are many applications who support voice and video chat, I still use speak Freely. I hope that this will be as good or better.

In fact....

[Kjella]

Sorry. Remember though that a stable, full-featured program doesn't have to be labeled 1.0.

...I'd call it an extremely rare occurance. You have the "nothing is ever perfect"-camp which are at 0.x permanently, and the "ship now, fix later" which definately don't qualify at 1.0. Only projects with a reasonable balance of both kinds seem to hit 1.0 well, OSS or commercial...

Kjella

Voice Chat for Yahoo?

[Wizard Drongo]

One thing I would like to see would be voice chat for Yahoo chat. Currently there doesn't seemt o be a single yahoo compatible voice chat client out there for linux. I heard rumours of Gyach Enhanced, but it turns out to be written in some really obscure audio plugin that just doesn't work. Yahoo webcams did work though (although I don't know if transmit works, since my Intel webcam doesn't work with linux yet). Mybe the guys and gals working on this should look into that guys source code for how he got it working, then improve from there.

Re:Voice Chat for Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've looked into Gyach Enhanced and I don't think there's much hope for it. The guy that's doing it doesn't seem to want any help and won't take any help. I was going to mess with it some more, but somewhere in the process I bought a Mac. Anyway, the best bet is getting the feature into mainline gyach or curphoo (text-only, but it'd be cool with voice-chat) (or whatever the latest name of the code that used to be curphoo is; you can find it on GNU Savannah I believe). There was a pure-python fork of curphoo a little bit ago that I got working, but I don't remember the name.

Gyach is at http://www4.infi.net/~cpinkham/gyach/
Curphoo was at http://www.nongnu.org/ (search for curphoo, you'll need to get it out of cvs)
Gyach Enhanced is on sf, but search google as it's not listed as its own project, rather a subproject of some paint package.

If you have questions, I can try to answer them as I've used the various open-source chat clients for years, going back to curfloo. Email me at bja@metawire.org or see brandonjadams in Hackers' Lounge:2.

ObStarTrek

[geminidomino]

"Helloooo computer... ah, a keyboard... how quaint..."

finally, another reason for GAIM to crash!!

[dioscaido]

Seriously. I can't use GAIM for more than 10 hours before SOMETHING fails, and the program segfaults.

Everyone's favorite messenger?

[Epistax]

I want to use gaim, I really do.. however:

File transfers don't always work.
Can't send/receive directories.
CPU hog
Can make a tray icon on minimizing, but can't remove task bar icon.
Chunky IM Screen gui (Wasted space)
No ability to set/unset auto-foreground on IM (uses a default scheme)

There are more but I can't usually think of them until I smack into them while using gaim, at which point I'm forced back to aim. Almost everything I think they need to fix is already in their todo list on sourceforge, and mostly over a year old.

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[tomstdenis]

> File transfers don't always work.

That's what a webserver is for ;-)

> Can't send/receive directories.

That's what zip or tar are for.

> CPU hog

Running latest GAIM right now. 0% cpu usage logged into AIM, Yahoo and MSN.

> Can make a tray icon on minimizing, but can't remove task bar icon.

On what OS? In Windows and icewm/gnome/kde the tray icon works just fine.

> Chunky IM Screen gui (Wasted space)

The GUIs are tabbed and resizable.

> No ability to set/unset auto-foreground on IM (uses a default scheme)

It can popup just I think the default is not.

Any more retarded GAIM comments you have to share? Otherwise that was the lamest trolling I've seen..

Tom

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[Epistax]

Excuse me, but you gave quite a trollish response, with a fake answer for each.

>That's what a webserver is for ;-)
>That's what zip or tar are for.
Neither of these are an excuse and the comments are by nature just plain ignorant. If someone wants to send me a directory I should tell them to zip it up because I use gaim? Isn't the whole reason aim has that feature is so you don't need to waste time zipping, and then unzipping? (or rarring, just tarring, don't want a flame for that)
>Running latest GAIM right now. 0% cpu usage logged into AIM, Yahoo and MSN.
That's you're system. Sure if you have enough resources you can tell how much it's using. It's about an order of magnitude above Aim.
>On what OS? In Windows and icewm/gnome/kde the tray icon works just fine.
Couple of request ID's: 920648 (gnome, kde), 871356 (windows).
>The GUIs are tabbed and resizable.
You're pathetic. Wasted space is not the size of the window, it's the amount of the window not being used. While aim has more raw % space wasted, gaim has a bad % y axis wasted. If you do want to compare to aim, how about hiding the tab when there's only one person? Check out Firefox with small icons. It's a very well utilized gui.
>It can popup just I think the default is not.
I believe the default is popup if it's a new person, or not if it is not. There are no options to influence this, although thankfully it doesn't happen when an away message is up.
>Any more retarded GAIM comments you have to share? Otherwise that was the lamest trolling I've seen..
Thanks for showing us who the troll was.

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[tomstdenis]

sending files... Well when I talk with my boss online and he wants files it takes me all of three seconds to zip them up [optionally gpg] and throw them on my local webserver. Not exactly challenging.

Of course that would require using the technology for what it is meant. email/IM for messages, ftp/http for files.

As for resources....Actually in windows AIM and GAIM take about the same memory. Neither require any cpu time. I mean sure if you're running a 16Mhz 386 it's prolly a little laggy but then so would notepad be.

As for the windows... the bottom type part is resizable... I just opened a chat dialog [full screen] and I would guess that a good 75-80% of the screen is the history buffer. Certainly enough to follow a discussion of depth. Of course I have multiple desktops ;-)

Anyways.... lame rants... Why not bitch that the Linux kernel doesn't have mp3 decoding built-in!!!????

Tom

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[base3]

All those alternatives are often blocked by firewalls. One of AIM's "features" is firewall circumvention--and once that's done, it's nice to be able to use the link to transfer files and all that.

Re:Everyone's favorite messenger?

[binford2k]

Can make a tray icon on minimizing, but can't remove task bar icon.

Don't minimize it, close the window.

Re:Perhaps..

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW complainer, what have you contributed lately?

Ah yes, the classic open sores retort to the accusation that some project doesn't do everything that some users want. Maybe if some of you developers would realize that many users aren't programmers and develop for all user's needs instead of masturbating your zealotry you might realize that making the "well you do it" response is completely retarded.

there's a hope!

[p80]

IM might potentially be as powerful as email. Yet we're still in the stone age, where everything is still proprietary and where a user of service X can't communicate with user of service Y just like in the pre-internet times. What makes one believe that Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and others never understood or wished for the Internet as it is today. Hopefully, Jabber is here to save us, or is it? ;)

Gaim vs kopete ???

[B5_geek]

I'm away from my linny box right now so I can't test this out myself, but What is the Difference between Gaim & Kopete?

I recell trying Gaim a few months back, but couldn't connect correctly to all the IM services that I needed. So, I have been using Kopete since then.

gaim?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that? I've been using naim for all these years.

I'd love to see naim with an aa plugin like mplayer, that would be great :)

Not true!! What about Rendezvous?

[bigBlackSabbath]

The codec (H.263) isn't tied into the server - the buddy system is. However, iChat is very capable of video conferencing over a local area network without the help of any server at all. Rendezvous based messaging looks for buddies using Rendezvous (which is an open standard itself - zeroconf).

If this port wanted to, it could provide support for zeroconf and thereby allow compatibility with iChat clients over Rendezvous.

Re:Not true!! What about Rendezvous?

[hak1du]

The codec (H.263) isn't tied into the server - the buddy system is. However, iChat is very capable of video conferencing over a local area network

I didn't mention iChat, but since you brought it up...

If this port wanted to, it could provide support for zeroconf and thereby allow compatibility with iChat clients over Rendezvous.

Using mDNS service discovery for iChat is a gimmick of no big practical significance--if you are on the same subnet, you can usually just walk over. But I suspect GnomeMeeting (not GAIM) will support this anyway at some point.

The real question is why iChat doesn't let you connect host-to-host across the Internet (at least I could never find a way). Given that they have Rendezvous-based connections for iChat, that would be trivial. If they did support that, iChat users could easily talk to GnomeMeeting users, as well as each other, anywhere in the world already, without signing up with anybody. The reason Apple doesn't enable that functionality is probably that Apple, like AOL and Yahoo!, like to keep this audience captive, but Apple has even less of a technical excuse.

Fortunately, open, free, non-proprietary video conferencing solutions without such arbitrary restrictions have been ported to MacOS as well.

Sigh

[merdaccia]

I love Gaim, converted many friends to it who like the tabbed windows, lack of ads, clean buddy list, account manager, etc. Gaim's moving forward ... but our mentality is stagnant and rotting. It's the same logic I posted here.

Yes, Gaim will benefit from video and chat support. But does that give us any more options? No. The second these proprietary protocols change, we're shit out of luck as usual. In fact, I recently talked to a policy decision making level employee at AOL. She told me that during those AIM protocol blockouts which were breaking Trillian, Gaim, and Jabber, AOL made a list of 27 possible changes to their protocol which would retain their client compatibility but break competing clients. And they enjoyed applying them.

The point is Gaim is in a strategic position as an open source/free client that's gaining popularity. A user can retain compatibility with his friends on proprietary protocols, while use an open source protocol amongst Gaim clients. If these protocols can provide equivalent functionality to their proprietary equivalents, Gaim has the ability to seamlessly migrate people.

That's why I think this isn't the right way to go about things. Instead of trying to bring proprietary video and chat protocols to Gaim, they should try to bring/write equivalent open source protocols.

Progress isn't inevitable ... let's not make it impossible.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

How about jabber? which gaim already supports

More features

[Espectr0]

Hey devs! How about file send and receive and display pictures for all protocols, please? Pretty please?

Question about your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

> Great, more "competition." See my sig.

Where is your sig? I can't find it either in this message or the "bonch (38532)" link.

Lets just hope something like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

...gets ported into Kopete. I like how Kopete looks. That's all.

Gaim

[MicroBerto]

I've been using and following gaim since it was born. Great project, been through some great leaders.

There is, however, one feature that I've willingly said that I'll pay 5 dollars via paypal to whoever implements it: I want the auto-reconnect plugin to turn on my away message if it had to reconnect me and I was away before I got disconnected.

I don't understand why the feature doesn't exist. Nothing bothers me more than getting disconnected, reconnected, and then i'm no longer away and one of my drunk friends wakes me up at 4am.

Any takers?

Re:Gaim

[PianoComp81]

You could always write a patch for it. I took a look at the gaim source code a few weeks ago to fix a bug and it didn't seem too hard to comprehend. The naming scheme actually made sense (unlike some other code I've looked at from other projects).

You're probably right that it wouldn't be that hard to put it back up, and I know I'd thank you for creating a fix for it. :)

Re:Gaim

[MicroBerto]

No. I don't want to program, I'm too busy myself to get involved in gaim development. I'm not being a bastard and requesting crazy features. I'm offering money for an easy feature.

Re: You Convert My Friends to This Protocol Please

[Cruxus]

I don't know about your friends, but not all of my friends are extremely technically competent Linux hackers who will switch to an open protocol for ideological reasons. Most of them will continue to use AIM on Windows until AOL and Microsoft demand a kidney and a lung to continue using their products.

Most of them are so resistant to change, in fact, they won't even consider using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer! If you think you can do a better job at moving these people away from Windows, Internet Explorer, and AIM, be my guest.

Re: You Convert My Friends to This Protocol Please

[merdaccia]

Umm, Linux has nothing to do with this, nor does competence, and what ideologocial reasons are you talking about? The reason for people to switch an IM client isn't about ideology: it's about usefulness, practicality, robustness, security. If something is visibly better and doesn't have a learning curve, people will switch. How many people still use ICQ?

Gaim meets those requirements (better than having two or three clients open, no bothersome ads or popups [tried MSN lately?], less clutter, etc). Firefox and Thunderbird also meet those requirements (tabbed browsing, integrated search, no security updates, clean interfaces). Most of all, all three are extremely simple to install and do not have a learning curve.

As an example, take AIM file transfers, plagued by firewalls and NATs because of bad design. If a Gaim client is talking to an AOL AIM client, and a file transfer can't happen because the AIM protocol's fucked up, that's fine, nothing can really be done about it. But when two people are using Gaim, they can't exchange files because the AIM protocol doesn't work right? How retarded! Why shouldn't there be another protocol supported by Gaim that allows the tranfer to go through? This is why we need open standardized protocols that work ... not because of ideology, but because of such effects that come hand in hand with using proprietary ones.

The voice and video chat branch is a good thing, it will help Gaim stay competitive with MSN. But I think Gaim needs an open alternative as a fallback.

will it work with...

[josepha48]

Yahoo messenger and aim. I know gaim works with text chat and these two systems, but I am wondering if they are going to also connect into the video and audio chat of aim and ymessenger. I have lots of friends that use yahoo messenger or aim and I chat with them this way. It would be nice to be able to use my quickcam 4000 and to chat with my mac friends, who are using ymessenger or aim.

more important

[CAIMLAS]

I see these as trivial features: there are other applications that can do voice/video already.

What I see gaim as needing is:
- proper, functional file transfer support. And if both users are behind a firewall, make it so gaim doesn't kill itself
- stop popping up the "you've been disconnected" messages, et al! They're irritating beyond belief. Especially, stop the bloody thing from repeatedly "warning" me of the lack of connectivity when it's trying to autoconnect, ffs.
- make it so it's easy to manage contacts. I should be able to easily add a friend's account to a specific user, and be able to group existing friend accounts into single "buddy contacts".

IMO, these things are some fairly large useability hindrances - certainly much more than the lack of video and voice conferencing. Of course, fixing flaws isn't as fun as "innovation," now is it? (If only people would realize that a functional UI is innovating...)

I'm surprised... better be a Plugin

[Klync]

I was just reading the FAQ at gaim's website the other day, and this announcement surprises me. I agree with the spirit of flexibility that the GPL provides, and surely the gaim people must have considered this when developing gaim, but I also agree with the Unix philosophy of modularity. See: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php#q24

I hope that the developers of this project are careful to code their "fork" so that it can be used as a plugin, or at least, the source can optionally be compiled with "-video" or something. It's getting to the point where I'm going to need a 20Gb hdd and 512Mb of ram, just to be able to run a file browser (nautilus), web browser (mozilla) and chat program (gaim).

These apps are becoming beasts, are starting to overlap each other in their functionality, and are making the desktop more cumbersome. Remember, if the end user does not want choice or flexibility, there's no reason why the OS or any apps need to integrate everything: the distro can provide that.

the grandparent is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

the font becomes, shock/horror/etc, the default windows font size! my god! how could they have done this!?!

Re:Gaim vs kopete ???

[otis wildflower]

I'm away from my linny box right now so I can't test this out myself, but What is the Difference between Gaim & Kopete?

Gaim runs on windows and Kopete is integrated nicely in KDE?

Still, Kopete's systray context menu is kinda boned, there should be a submenu listing all online buddies so you can chat with them directly, rather than have to bring up the panel and double-click the user. IMHO ideally there is no screen real-estate used for an IM, a systray with context menus is perfect.

IOW, do what iChat does, since Apple got it right. You can use a menubar pulldown to chat with people, go on/offline, etc. Very efficient, and the right thing to do.

In fact, KDE really should look at OS X and just steal everything. OS X is where we want to be, it's just that good. That coupled with DCOP and KParts would be perfect...

wondering what this thing can do yet?

[thecombatwombat]

They don't seem to have much of a website up, but from the readme in the source:

This is Gaim-vv, not stock Gaim. Don't report bugs you experience with Gaim-vv to Gaim. If you find a bug with Gaim-vv, see if you can reproduce it with Gaim and report it Gaim if you can. Otherwise report it to us. Our bug tracker is at http://sf.net/projects/gaim-vv Compiling is currently fairly complicated. Automake/Autoconf gurus who want to improve things are encourged to contribute. There's a patch tracker at http://sf.net/projects/gaim-vv and also a mailing list, gaim-vv-devel@lists.sf.net.
To compile with Yahoo Webcam viewing support you'll need libj2k installed. Hopefully you can get it from the same place you got Gaim-vv. If there's no package yet, you may have to check it out of CVS. You may have to hack the build system to get it to build without libj2k. This is a bug on our part.
For our MSN features, you'll need: libosip linphone, either from *our* CVS, or from a package that we provide.
Stock linphone won't work at all (right?).
You'll need to configure linphone with "--with-osip=dir --disable-ipv6 --disable-trace". After installing linphone, you'll need to copy config.h of linphone to, for example, /usr/local/include/linphone/linphone_config.h Copy the header files in the mediastreamer directory to /usr/local/include/mediastreamer
You'll need to ./configure Gaim-vv with "--enable-linphone --enable-msn-vv".
If you have any problems, but manage to solve them, feel free to send us an updated version of this file (or a diff).

After you start Gaim-vv, you'll need to enable the J2k plugin under Tools->Preferences->Plugins before you will be able to view others Yahoo! Webcams. Broadcasting your own Cam with Yahoo! isn't supported at this time.

"Open Source" community indeed.

[Abattoir]

It's great to see the GAIM program gain more features.

And it's ironic for Open Source programmers to let closed source proprietary standards be the source of "innovation" for desktop computing.

Support open source protocols and initiatives. The Jabber chat protocol already exists. Why not develop audio/video for that and encourage your Win-whipped friends to delve into open source programs by migrating popular application use to OSS?

HA HA

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like gentoo optimizations screwed up your post.

for a second

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the title "gets violence support" and I was thinking "man, finally.."

Best Part

[phorm]

As of yet I've seen some nice videoconferencing apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I haven't seen many that communication between the three. Assuming that GAIM will run on OSX, I believe that one of the nicest things is that users could use GAIM on different OS's and still manage to communicate using the video/video-chat features.

ayttm

[BluesMoon]

ayttm has had video support (in msn and yahoo) for a very long time now. Voice support for yahoo has been available in pyVoice Chat.

The main stumbling block in implementing these things has not been technical. It's been the patents that cover the voice and video formats used.

Re: You Convert My Friends to This Protocol Please

[Cruxus]

As I stated in my previous comment, even when the program is superior, the users just won't switch out of inertia. My family only switched to Mozilla Firefox because I set it as the default browser on their computer, and they can't figure out how to make Internet Explorer the default again. Now they're used to it, and generally don't mind it unless a Flash animation or Java applet doesn't play (I never installed the worthless (in my opinion) plug-ins to play such crap).

I suppose, depending on what circles you socialize in, other people on your buddy list will be using Gaim; but, at least on my buddy list, everyone else is using the standard Windows version of AOL's AIM client.

These open-source advancements are good--no doubt about that--but the problem with an instant messaging system is that the people you communicate with need to use the system, too; and for now most users are trapped on AOL/AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger.

The ideal, of course, would be a standardized, nonproprietary instant messaging system as we have now for e-mail. I can see screen names being something like bob@host, laimer@aim.com, etc. Unfortunately, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will never agree to this.

IM Alternatives

[Foresto]

I use trillian on windows, and ayttm (formerly everybuddy) on linux. Have any of you tried miranda? Opinions, please.