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Gaim Releases Version 1.0.0
bfree writes "Congratulations to all in the gaim team as they release for download version 1.0.0 (changelog). For those who don't know what gaim is, you could read the full answer on their site but for the lazy: 'Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.' Gaim is also the 2nd most active project on Sourceforge and the 4th most popular on Freshmeat and seemingly all round #1 Free IM client!"
Congratulations to the GAIM team!
Gaim is easily one of the best open-source apps for non-tech savvy users. Without gaim (and Firefox) I wouldn't have been able to convince some of my friends to try linux.
Free Image Hosting
Go to sourceforge.net, it's #1.
There isn't a lot of difference between 0.82.1 and 1.0. Why have they decided that this should be version 1.0?
Should I prefer it to Fire?
They don't care.
In fact, Gaim is the most active projecy on the sourceforge. The list is (from the sourceforges main page):
1 Gaim
2 eGroupWare: Enterprise CollaborationAccepting Donations
3 Azureus - BitTorrent ClientAccepting Donations
4 FCKeditorAccepting Donations
5 phpMyAdminAccepting Donations
6 Compiere ERP + CRM Business Solution
7 OpenWFEAccepting Donations
8 SugarCRM Accepting Donations
9 WinMergeAccepting Donations
10 POPFile - Automatic Email ClassificationAccepting Donations
Maybe being slashdoted increased its activity...
I've been using Gaim since the late '90s. I even donated some beer to them way back in the day - it takes me back to my college days.
Thanks guys - it's amazing how much Gaim has expanded. I check regularly for a release and have pushed many people to check it out.
gaim lost out to miranda (http://miranda-im.org) for one of my customers.. his problem gaim is too heavy / resource intensive for their workstations (here in india most workstations at still stuck at celeron ~700 or so + 64 MB ram and run 98SE).
miranda on the other hand works quite nicely, btw we use jabber only (no msn/yahoo/icq/oscar support).
from those of us who don't regularly compile our own software, I don't think gaim qualifies as mac compatible till someone bothers putting a mac binary on their site.
Yeah, Gaim 1.0... Good...
But, what I _really_ need is video/audio support for MSN, Y! and AIM. I am asking for this for 2 years now, no one in the OSS community has managed to integrate something like that to a multi-IM application.
No, Gnomemeeting is not the same, it is not compatible with the 99,9% of the IM world. It is a conference app, I just need integrated video/audio for MSN, Y! and AIM.
I don't trust any software from people that can't even type "Mac OS X" correctly.
IM clients generally make extremely poor IRC clients, so I'm not surprised it was shunned by them. As for Trillian, WORST INTERFACE EVAR!!! That, and it won't import the AIM buddy list automatically.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
While I'm glad to see gaim moving on to a "stable" number, wouldn't it be smart to wait until the boys at gaim-vv got video and voice chat working? Gaim rocks for an instant messaging client, but can't do the major stupid little things that the "official" clients can do. This may turn off users who see 1.0 and expect it to do that...
Then again, I might be paranoid and need to have my morning coffee.
Not to burst anyone's bubble... but i've been waiting for this story to hit the front page just so i could!
a d_id=5592699&forum_id=33079
This isn't a 1.0 release it is a 1.0.0 release: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thre
All it means is that future releases will be in X.Y.Z format. X will mean a change to the API breaking old plugins, Y is any other change, and Z is pretty much meaningless.
i remember when i was in school and my primary workstation was a used IRIX machine.
:)
:)
I went through the pain of getting gtk built on my machine, and actually emailed the gaim people (just 2 guys back then, iirc) some trivial diffs to make gaim not die on irix.
Back in school i think i complained about how linux-centric f/oss software was (nothing written by a linux user ever clean compiled on irix... and not often on solaris..) and gaim was certainly not stellar in this regard..
Now i'm less antsy about such things.. and despite not really like the "penguin pimps" attitude i seem to recall the gaim crew having,
AOL AIM client for Win32 is so bad that installing Gtk32 and Gaim seems like the path of least resistance
It's nice that there's a non-AOL AIM client. I'm an IE, Media Player, and XP user, but even I can't stand AOL's installers and apps
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've been using Trillian as my chat client of choice for as long as I can remember, but the other day I thought I'd take a look what Gaim is like. When I tried to add people to my contacts list it insisted on getting confirmation from them. What's up with that? Trillian never asked for anything similar.
Now you could say this about any instant messaging client, but Gaim supports a nice bunch of protocols and VERY regularly brings out a new update. There have been a number of problems with Yahoo in the 0.7x series, but these have been gone for long now. I plan on using it for a LONG time to come.
I've wanted to use paypal to donate, but they don't support that; instead they sell stuff on eBay but I find that too much of a hassle.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I use Gaim, but a few annoying things.
Normal windows popups when re-connecting, so if you are in the middle of typing, it gets the normal windows treatment of stealing focus. I hate focus stealing popup windows.
MSN re-connects alot, need to hide that...
Be nice if you could change your IM preferences under gaim, most you have to use the real client.
Forced alias's change when the user changes their nick.
Can't change themes without re-installing.
But for an all 1 in one client, its the best.
I've been looking for a very lightweight IM client for a while now and Miranda looks to be the best bet so far.
ICQ (even -Lite) is way to bulky, Trillian isn't much better. I was about to try Gaim but now I think I'll pass. I don't need any fancy features like skinning or SMS, just basic messaging. Everything I've seen of Miranda-IM so far looks great.
This is great! They reached version ! release.
Not many OSS projects van claim a version 1 release.
But a version 1 implies no more bugs, wil there be no bugs in GAIM??
Just my thoughts,
M
Am I the only one who doesn't like scrolling through my buddy list?
:-(
Most applications, when maximized, will utilize the entire available area to display information. Gaim will leave 90% whitespace. This is weird.
Does anyone want the buddy list to spill into multiple columns feature, or is it just me? Sean said it probably wouldn't happen.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I won't be happy until 1.0.0.0 comes out...hopefully that will fix the nasty "version number isn't obfuscated enough" bug.
I don't understand, while MSN and Yahoo! file transfer works now (and AIM for some lucky folks), ICQ file transfer is still _not_ working. Does Gaim developers plan on working on this? I would have thought a 1.0 release will implement full file transfer support for the 4 or 5 major IM networks.
Try bitlbee - an IRC to IM gateway. I've been using it for sometime and it's superb, I can use my favourite IRC client (irssi) to chat to everyone via an ssh session to my box at home, whatever server room I happen to be holed up in at the time.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
I use Gaim and I have recently upgraded to version 1.0.0
I've got to say that it is a great IM client, specially if you use more than one network.
But a warning, not all functions may work as you are used to in the "original" IM clients. One example is the filetransfer part. It has been worked on and is much improved now, but it doesn't work as good in gaim as in some other clients.
But, if I was to give an overall judgment, I'd definatley recommend it.
Did they ever resolve that whole Window-Binary/Source license bitch-fest they were having before?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Congrats to the Gaim development team! I'm a programmer myself, and I can tell you (if you don't know from personal experience), it's hard as hell to make such a great product and nurture it to the 1.0 release!
Thanks for making a great product, gaim-team, and I'll continue to use it!
- Code Dark
i always assumed gaim was just another aim client, never realized it did msn and icq as well... this story convinced me to try it out, and yeah its pretty cool... just needs one little added option... options > preferences > text size > readable.. aside from that i like it.
You still don't get native encryption with Gaim, and Gaim lacks GPG support for Jabber (as Gabber does). The only way to get support is to download gaim-e, which frequently doesn't build with the current gaim.
May we never see th
This is an annoying problem for my company. As more of our customers outsource to India, we're getting demands* to support running our server software on Windows 98. We know there are problems with the low level networking on W98, but finding a workaround isn't worth it to us, because who the hell is going to run a real server on 98, especially now it's end of lifed?
* why is it that Indian developers always come across on forums as if the rest of the world is put there to solve their problems for them?
For those of you who are sick of using the Sametime client, Meanwhile is a plugin for Gaim to let you use Sametime.
It's availible from http://meanwhile.sourceforge.net/
RegardselFarto
But by the time you emerge sync I could have already downloaded/configured/made/and installed gaim on my Slackware box. Of course, if you just download the individual ebuild, it'd be close.
Not to knock on the developers, but how difficult can it be to implement some basic IRC features, like graphical commands for setting channel modes? Or being able to view the ban list for a channel? Or customizable part/quit messages? Or proper text formatting (this is a real big one)? Or an option for auto-rejoining channels when kicked? Or being able to see the time, date, and setter of a channel's topic?
Also, I get encoding errors with noticeable frequency when I'm on IRC ("There was an error converting this message. Check the 'Encoding' option in the Account Editor"). I currently use UTF-8, but at one point also tried ISO-8859-1 with no success. I never had a problem with this in X-Chat. Anyone have an idea on how to solve this?
I'm not a big fan of GAIM the client.
:)
However, I'm a huge fan of libgaim.
Does anyone remember mICQ? They were the first people to reverse engineer the ICQ protocol. Until then, you were forced to use the seriously crappy Java ICQ client if you wanted to use it on anything but windows.
micq however, IMO of course, was a crappy text-based program that had a horrific interface. Really, I would much rather use my IRC client for ICQ than stick with this thing.
And now I can. See, the micq guys caught on and released libicq or libmicq, I can't remember at this point. I imagine a good portion of this code is still in libgaim.
The point is though, that others took libicq and applied their UI design skills and made very useful programs out of it.
And this is what I get in libgaim.
I'm not a fan of how you have to contort gaim or work on a specific system with specific plugins to keep windows from popping up on you while you're typing. (I will admit it's been a while since I used gaim, so this climate may have changed)
However, if you wanted the best support for the various networks out there, GAIM is the way to go.
libgaim allows me to get rid of the (IMO again) clunky interface and replace it with something else. On the mac, my workstation, I use AdiumX, but before I used Fire (no link, sorry). Both are libgaim-based which means that the advances in this library (especially recently as YIM and MSN seem to change their protocols hourly) are almost instantly integrated into the front-end of my choice. The 'hive mind' mentality here is very effective.
I *really* wish that more people working on protocols would do this - right now, several HTTP libraries are available but developers refuse to settle on one - I hope apr solves this once and for all. I don't want to worry as a developer about the idiosyncracies of apr, libwww, and others when developing a web app.
Object brokers are another example. If I install GNOME, KDE, and any other app that uses an ORB, chances are I have many ORBs on my system - for what reason? Those "extra" features that the developer can't live without. I know GNOME and KDE are finally working on making it cross-platform (in the GUI sense), but this provides another good example.
Do what you like at the GUI or application level - but normalize the libraries (and make MORE of them that meet specific, unique needs so they can be chained together). This gives the developer a reasonable notion of stability at the library and API layer, and the user a reasonable notion of functionality. Also portability, security, and enhancements come quicker and cheaper because more eyes are looking at the same code. Fix a buffer overflow? Well, you've fixed it in 20 programs instead of one. Doesn't that make everyone happy?
Sorry for the rant. I just feel the need to talk about important topics on my mind that no one will listen to or care about because they're buried at the bottom of a slashdot forum.
Tried it, liked it, kept it. It's about the nicest thing I can say about software.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Why is phone-gaim not integrated with the Gaim? Is the phonegaim only for Linspire?
...shouldn't Gaim developers be using Gaim to communicate?
*scratches*, *scratches* head...
It's a shame this nasty bug is still in GTK. When you view a profile that has characters in Symbol or some other weird font, such as a heart or fancy icon, Gaim will crash. The only work around for now is to go to Preferences, Message Text, and turn on "ignore font faces."
Sorry if I'm missing something very obvious, but I can't see any reference to an OS X version on their site. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
cheers
I was told there wasn't going to be a 1.0 version ... by the devs!!!
They were going to release 0.100 and go on with their lives ...
WTF??
I've beem using it since the Spanish Inquisition, in English ofcourse
it's now a 1.0 but there's STILL no proper support for Direct IM with the offical client. is this REALLY that hard to implement properly? I think it's gotten to the point where they simply ignore the lack of support as a bug report.
...and that's all there is to it.
Gaim is an excellent client, and it's really come a long way in usability. But it's the little things like spellcheck and its very cool plugin architecture that keep me coming back to it.
Titus Barik
one thing that does them "all", never becames the #1, at least not yet ...
while trying to be effective in all possible ways the config has been getting quite big, but at the same time, some options are grouped together so tight, that you lose either one or another feature that you would like to see.
when i use irc, i wanna have all the "business" in one windows, with different tabs, and no "alters" about any messages, when i do msn or yahoo, i want different windows, on different virtual desktops even, and i do want the popupping effect.
there are actually tons more examples why having it all in one does destroy the features that it would have, when it'd be separated
i use amsn for example while trying to work with people on msn. why ? cause it's far more easier to configure, it works better, looks better, supports stuff that gaim doesn't.
don't get me wrong here, i do use gaim sometimes, but only when i have to yahoo someone, otherwise i keep my fingers away from it, cause it's clumsy and need's yet some more tuning in config/look until you can really say that's an possible alternative to other more advanced clients.
i'll keep my fingers crossed for gaim, as it seems to have a promising future, but a lot of work does have to be done first.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Here's a half-baked log analyzer that I wrote in a weekend. It works with GAIM log files for the AIM protocol format up to about version .72 (I run it on .59.9, the last GTK 1 version).
Here is an example of its output on my primary username.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
... keeping me from using this, is that it doesn't support GPG encryption like gabber or psi :-(
...What a wonderful worllddd....! hehe
if it did, all my friend would switch to GPG!
I don't use GAIM, so take this with a grain of salt, and I mean nothing personal to the GAIM team.
It would seem to me that being on the most active list for long periods of time might indicate bloat and haphazard development, just as easily as it could indicate anything else. How is "activity" determined? CVS checkins. I'd rather be a user of a middle-of-the-road team; responsive to input and considerate of new ideas, but not just pouring bucketfuls of changes into the codebase.
[
I get "Unspecified fatal error encountered, aborting" and log messages of "Failed to load Pango module for id: 'Basic ScriptEngineWin32'".
Anyone else getting this message? Oh... this is on Win XP until I can get my gentoo for amd64 working.
I love gaim, and I use it every day, but man it confuses me sometimes. How are you supposed to pronounce it? A bunch of people at work use it, and mention it sometimes in telephone conversations, pronouncing it "game", which I guess is correct (or is it (GEE-AIM?). Sample confusing usage:
THEM: Do you have gaim?
ME: What game? I have lots of games.
OR
THEM: Send me a message, I've got gaim.
ME: So... you want me to send you a message about playing some basketball? You got game?
And so on. How do other people combat this conversational conundrum?!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
they've finally fixed the MSN buddylist synchronization so that if a buddy exists only locally and not on the server you can choose to add it again or not. this previously caused me lots of grief since i have the same accounts at work and at home, so I couldn't remove buddies because they'd get re-added when I fired up gaim on the other computer.
Sign onto AIM and GAIM at the same time and IM yourself.
The font you see in GAIM is actually a lot smaller than what it really is... so if you're seeing "normal" text im GAIM, your recipient is getting this god awful 18 pt type.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Now they only need shortcut keys and a messaging mode.
Seriously, chat mode with windows cluttering the desktop is really unpleasant, and if I need to use a window full of tabs I'd rather use the screen + irssi + bitlbee combo. And have to use the mouse to open every message is just as annoying as having them poping up automatically. Kopete suffers from the very same problem, lack of shortcut keys and a crappy messaging only mode (which combined with shortcut keys is da bomb my brotha).
Until these issues are solved, the Magic Combo will remain the master of IM here.
I was trying the other day to make someone switch to gaim. It looks like the best feature people like about messenger is something about adding pictures of yourself.
I find that reason amazing, in addition Messenger comes pre-installed and is a hell to uninstall.
Anyway I do use gaim, and we're lucky there is a windows version. Thank you
Last night someone commenting on the idea of 3D avatars in IM software made the point that these things are fairly useless, but what would be really useful would be a kind of canvas next to the text area where one could just do simple black and white sketching, since a sketch is a wonderful way of getting and idea across when words fail one.
n e:20,30,20,50
I thought about this and realised some points (which also relate to GAIM to bring this post on topic):
1. There have been some Flash and Shockwave based sketching chat ideas around for while but they aren't mainstream since they don't offer the simplicity and flexibility of mainstream IM apps.
2.The problem with a universal sketchpad in all IM apps is one of protocol. It would be hard to convince yahoo, MS and AOL to come up with a non-proprietry protocol that works everywhere.
3.The only application which runs on almost all platforms and supports most protocols is GAIM.
4.My idea is to make a fork of GAIM that has a Canvas with basic sketching utensils next to the text area (rectangle, oval, straight line and freehand, filled and empty with about 8 or 9 colours)
5.The protocol would be very simple: Text based, similar to a simplified postscript or html imagemap.
6.The protocol would simply send a small sequence of text characters indicating that what follows is to be interpreted as a sketch, with a similar sequence of characters at the end indicating that the sketch is over.
Example:
You draw a black empty rectangle with a line pointing to it and hit enter:
The application sends the following as plain text:
##%%##%%
color black-rect,unfilled:10,10,30,10,30,30,10,30-strli
##%%##%%##
The other IM client of your buddy interprets that as the same black unfilled rectangle with a line coming from it.
7.The GAIM fork would have a simple sketch on/off button to enable/disable sketching.
the world ended yesterday
Jay | http://oldos.org
No. Miranda is by far the best on Windows.
But I run only Linux at home, so which ICQ client I'll use?
First I tried gaim, didn't like it's interface.
Then both forks of everybuddy: ayttm and eb-lite. Still unsatisfied.
I was missing a linux port of Miranda..
Then a non-geek friend of mine told me about SIM.
Still not perfect, but I found it to be better then the alternatives, and closer to the Miranda approach (plugin-based, and a lean interface).
That's funny.
I have used many (mirabilis, miranda, trillian, gaim, ayttm, eb-lite, center-icq, bitlbee) IM programs, and by far mICQ has the most comfortable user interface.
The only problem is that it's ICQ-only, and nowadays many people are only on msn, so I had to switch. My choice now: SIM.
Kopete ( for KDE ) is also setup this way, using a plugin interface instead of having the protocols internal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gaim can overflow a buffer when parsing RTF for the Novell GroupWise protocol, allowing any user with OpenSSL and a network connection to execute arbitrary code as the user running Gaim! Yay Gaim!
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
The gaim's website link for the Red Hat 9 rpm package results in an error. Anyone? thanks
that it sucks big fucking donkey balls!
Its the worse program that mimicks stupidest instant messenger known to man kind, aol instant messenger!
Three words: Gaym sucks balls.
(Yes, it should be called "gaym"!)
I just tried adium - when you mount the disk image, which happens automagically when you download it, the instructions are: "To install adium, drag the duck to the Applications folder".
:-)
That's why people use macs!
I've never seen linux install isntructions that were so simple
I like GAIM, my favorite IM software. Works well on Linux and Windows. Much better than AOL's software, that's for sure.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
I've been using gaim for windows and I think it's great being able to talk in all those networks without having to have ten different clients. What I don't like though is that the windows version doesn't have the option to send the buddy list to the tray instead of having it sitting on the taskbar. Anybody can help me with that?
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
and theyre even at version 3.0.0. that means three times more stable than gaim,
three times more features, three thousand times smalles userbase.
but check it out.
http://www.nongnu.org/freehoo/
its got readline support, and its got guile support. what could someone want more
in a client? too bad it doesnt support irc.
It would be quite a lot of work, and I don't have the experience to make it possible, but I was thinking it would be a killer app for Linux. It's the one program I miss switching over from Windows.
I've ran "apt-get update" and "apt-get install gaim" and I'm only up to 0.82.1
Oh well. I can wait.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
At least in the current version (sorry, the version that was current 2 days ago!) the RSA plugin doesn't work with meanwhile. Yes, I know sametime encrypts the traffic, but it doesn't hide it from THE MAN :-)
-- I speak only for myself.
Seriously, adium is SOOOOOOOOOOO much better than ichat. i get a nice log of previous conversations, tabbed browsing, and a beautifully simple and intuitive interface. as much as people like ichat, they should give adium a try. also, mad propz to the adium team...
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
On my system I see that gaim depends on approximately 34 separate dynamic libraries and has a footprint of approximately 9 megabytes. I would really like to see a slim version of gaim for those people who want just oscar with a minimal amount of bloat (no emoticons, smiley themes, font face support, large buddy icons, dimming buddy icons, extra protocols, etc). The only "must have" feature I really need above basic messaging is conversation logging. I really don't see why you need a gazillion libraries to do this.
Just my 2c,anon
Has anyone actually managed to get gaim working on OSX? I'll admit that I'm a bit of a *nix newbie, but I haven't been able to get this working. I even tried installing it on x11 and with fink with no luck. If anyone has some steps that I could use to make it work I'd love to hear them!
/.
Granted maybe sourceforge is a better place to express this concern but since it was mentioned in the blurb I thought I'd ask
Console users might like to try CenterICQ. I pretty much leave it up all the time within a Screen session, and can connect to it via ssh from wherever ... work, home, PDA, etc.