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A First Look At Gaim 2.0
surgicaltubing writes to spotlight the progress towards vesion 2.0 for Gaim, the open source, multi-protocol IM client. "The Gaim 2.0 release is nearing its home stretch. The Gaim team released beta 4 last week, with a number of new features and UI improvements." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
1. I can't wait to try it out a year after it's release when it hits portage (stable)
2. Maybe by then I'll have someone to talk to and actually get to use it...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
oh noes :/ no gadu-gadu support?
Beta 4 is working great (Windows port). I haven't found any issues. If only this app couldbe skinned. (or it can, I am just not aware of it..?)
The article claims that Gaim 2.0 doesn't have Google Talk support . . . however, in this case TFA is quite wrong.
Google Talk is done on the Jabber protocol.
To set up Google Talk, set up a Jabber account, your S/N is your gmail username, and the server is talk.google.com. I have it set up right now myself, and it works fine.
The gaim people could, of course, make it easier to set up GT, but the support is in fact there.
Gaim is indeed a nifty app, but my main beef with it is that, while it can do a lot of protocols, it can't seem to do any of them particularly well. From what I've played with in 2.0, that hasn't changed much. In particular, Gaim's IRC capabilities are lacking, a lot.
Find me a versatile chat client that does a well-specialized job with each protocol, and then I'll take notice. Gaim is moving forward, but they've still got a long way to go.
Not to mention, I try to stay away from GTK-based apps, especially under Windows. :\ They feel uncomfortable.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
i think that right now kopete it's far more better than gaim, it support a lot of things and it's gonna to support also windows live feature for kopete4 or maybe sooner
I've been using 2.0 for ages now. I didn't even realize it was beta 3 (I had completely forgotten until just now).
Given, certain things like files transfer dont really work, but I use email for that. Gaim works great for AIM because I dont have to worry about AIM virii, and I like the tabs and plugins (logging plugins - shows me what the last convo was when i open a IM box).
I guess for people who really need things like audio chat and vidio chat, and want to use it for other protocols, it may not be great - but for me it serves the purpose excellently.
Does anyone else have a problem where Gaim 1 and Beta 2 crash while trying to connect to MSN?
I've not been able to find anyone who can replicate this.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
All I can say is- About time! Very well done, I might add.
One problem, unrelated to gaim-text, is the status/away system of 2.0. Anyone who actually takes the time to write away msgs, DOES NOT reuse old away msgs. Why clutter up the status button with old msgs? Please remove this "feature."
I see you're making jokes already; do you think this is some kind of GAIM?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Does anyone know how GAIM 1.5's auto-away works? It doesn't look like it works. I use Jabber and if I manually set my status to away, it creates an away dialog where I can click "I'm back." But if I just let my session idle, the dialog box showed up say maybe 2 or 3 times (I'm also concurrently connected to an AIM and Yahoo account). And I've never seen any documentation (too lazy to look at code) that describes the difference between Idle Time Reporting: Gaim usage vs. Windows usage. But selecting either one doesn't seem to help. Auto-away is checked.
and if you try SIM-IM, you will find that it's far better even than kopete (and has been for years). i still don't uderstand why KDE had to build a new messenger from the ground up, when we have this cross-platform messenger with KDE support. it's development was abandoned at the time kopete was stating up, and just needed to be picked up. it's developed again, thankfully:))
I have just tested the new gaim (2.0 beta4) and there is one annoying thing they have yet to fix: If you send messages using MSN fast they will get refused at the server level by micro$oft. MSN messenger stores your messages and only sends like one per second I seem to recall. Gaim does not have this feature, thus if you are a fast writer or write small messages and send them quickly after one another they will NOT go through.
This bug has been present for ages. I had hoped this would be fixed in 2.0beta4, but no. I hope this is fixed in the final version! Other than that gaim 2.0 seems very cool!
-pug
I've been using Gaim simply because I hate the ads on aim and I like many of its features. However, I have trouble sending files and getting direct IMs. Is this a configuration problem, or is it fixed in 2.0 or what?
I've been using 2.0.0 beta 3.1 for a while now. I like it.
My only gripe is that it stores account passwords in plain text, on Windows at least, inside the accounts.xml file. (On Windows, this is located in %HOMEPATH%\Application Data\.gaim)
Surely it's not too much of a hassle to encrypt the passwords? Are passwords encrypted in the later versions of the beta?
full support is just not there, gaim is very behind in terms of what the protocols can offer now, gaim cannot even support invisible logins yet. Yahoo has had that for YEARS. I'm not talking down on the gaim guys, I know it must be difficult to write an app based on closed protocols. But I cant just pretend everything is ok with gaim and it supports all my IM needs, it doesn't.
i am using gaim too since msn live messenger is fully loaded with bugs.
http://www.villavilla.eu http://www.alanya.in
GAIM 2.0 is not actually out yet. This is only a beta, and as someone who has been waiting for over a year for the software to be released, I don't expect it to show up anytime soon. In fact, it's reminding me of Vista's development. Very little information, and feature scale backs. The merging of the Gaim-vv code into 2.0 was canceled, the results of the Google Summer of Code 2005 were released right around the time the Summer of Code 2006 was ending.
The longest thread on the project's forum page is still a thread asking about the delays even though it was closed at the end of August. And it has it's share of jerks, but it really illustrates what a Debian-like release cycle this has been.
I used to use GAIM, but now I greetly prefer meebo ( http://www.meebo.com/ ), an IM embedded in your browser (with AJAX).
But no files transfer, nor video or audio! But freakly useful!
Do you know how many wierdo gay programmers would be into that? Totally beats cyber! Better yet, you know how many 12 year old girls would miss-use that on their MySpace page in ways that were truly horrifying? Like, oh my god, skins! And then the sonic dildo pops out..... I'm totally with you here. Great idea. Sonic Skull-fucking. The next non- open source OS I pay for had better have that feature or I'm not paying for it.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I have not yet tried GAIM2, but have tried other IM clients on linux and they are 'ok' I guess. So if what I am talking about is indeed in GAIM2 then I apologise and will duly try it (I acannot do so right now).
But.. I am trying to "make the switch" at home, away from MS to Linux (I dont hate MS, I just have my reasons)
The problem is, until I can get something that has all the same features as MSN Messenger (all the smileys, including animated ones, etc etc etc) one person in our household will not be happy. Is there an IM client that can do this? It looks like the Wine support for the latest Messenger is not up to par.
Until there is a suitable replacement, I am stuck on XP.
your sig: should be 'perspiration', you have an extra 'e'.
there are tree reasons why most of the people don't use gaim 1) msn messages sometimes are not delivered 2) the custom emoticons support is still not complete 3) really slow developement
Does this new build support the Offline Messages you can send in the main MSN client?
I find this incredibly useful, and is the one reason I keep the official client installed.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
I checked out 2.0, and the only noticeable "improvement" over 1.5.0 that I noticed was that the "raise IM window on events" setting was now off by default and missing from the configuration menu. I'm using Yahoo! Messenger on Windows (and the respective gaim plugin on Linux), and one of the first things I do is I turn off sounds - I find them irritating at best. I also hate the tabs feature in gaim, it's so easy to have somebody talk to you without you noticing because, oh wait, it's in a different tab. I prefer the Windows behaviour (separate Windows, flashing if there's some activity), so I disable tabs and, in 1.5 I would set the "raise IM window" option. I think most people that use YM on Windows find that comfortable, so why it was removed from the GUI is beyond me. Also, the time it took to release 4 betas, and the rate at which the project page is updated, make me think that gaim is not exactly one of the most active OSS projects. It's stable enough for me and more comfortable to use than Kopete, but I don't see it evolving too much in the near future.
Do they support file transfers yet, or still just pretend to?
It's rather sad when two computers with the same version of gaim and absolutely no firewalls can't use a file transfer. I think I've had it work when sending from Gaim to Aim, but never Aim to Gaim. Anyway their lack of a functioning file transfer system is the only thing keeping me off of Gaim.
Kopete supports MSN Webcam audio and video, and Google Talk Jingle upport works as well (experimental only)
The biggest problem for me is that it's still a pretty unattractive interface. It's getting better, and I know a lot of people will shout about the skin-ability of GTK apps, but that is way too much effort.
How hard would it be to just tell it that in a chat window I want to _display_ green text on a black background? I don't want to change what I'm sending (since I don't care past using caps to shout at people), just give me a menu option for "background color" and "text color".
(All the GTK stuff, whether it's GAIM or Gnome or whatever, seems to be spiralling into some ridiculous complexities. It's hard for us non-programmers to get a handle on all the time)
I've been using 2.0 b3 since it came out. Very few problems, other than the normal GTK issues (I happen to be used to some of the CUA conventions that GAIM's GTK implementation does not).
Regarding real estate, my usage patterns have changed very little between 1.x and 2.0, so little, in fact, that I've been using them both daily with no attention paid to which version I was using. (Although 2.0 does have some improvements regarding plugins...)
As for the tree vs tabbed thing - I didn't even really notice, because my buddy window is almost never open. Ctrl-M for sending a new message and auto-suggest as you type in your buddy's name was the reason I loved GAIM in the first place. I believe 2.0 allows you to finally type aliases instead of user ids, but I'm not 100% positive.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
My friend uses Kopete and says it integrates with KDE better than GAIM with GNOME. He uses ICQ, AOL and GTalk networks w/o any problems.
I personally (historically) use Linux and (long ago fixed pre-utf8) poor support for internationalization as an excuses to not run IMs under Linux. Leaves more time for work. ;-)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
... where it can actually hang onto a connection for more than five minutes? Because, wow, do I really hate the disconnect/ reconnect cycle.
-BA
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Is anybody working on implementing the Skype API in gaim? http://share.skype.com/sites/devzone/2006/01/api_r eference_for_skype_20_bet.html
http://www.skype.com/company/legal/eula/
Any word on whether the Win32 port will play nice with modern GTK+ shared libs? I'd love to get rid of trillian basic and gtalk, but I'm too lazy to fuck with the current gaim and I won't do without the latest gimp.
It could be that Microsoft intentionally limits the message rate to help decrease flooding. Therefore the problem is with GAIM because it doesn't follow the flooding policy designed into the (undocumented) MSN messenger protocol. Regardless of why it doesn't work, it would be nice if GAIM fixed it.
Is it possible to turn off the blinking/warning in windows when a message is received and if that person is already open in a window, to not have it blink in the tray.
The previous version was much better in that regard.
If those two things could be fixed (because they are really annoying in windows) I will be really happy with the new version.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
You don't like it, improve the source.
As long as we're getting things out of our system, I'd like to point out how completely unproductive this sentiment is.
First, most people aren't programmers, and even of people who know something about programming, fewer still have the skills required to make any meaningful modification to an open-source program.
Second, even if a person does know how to program, and is familiar with the project's language / graphical environment / architectural style, except in particular instances where there are no good alternatives available, or where the changes are trivial, it's almost always easier (assuming you value your time at all) to just use an alternative -- even a commercial one -- then spend several days or weeks reading somebody else's code in order to change it. Really, the only reason to work on an OSS project is if it's so specialized that it's the only thing going, or you enjoy working on it and are willing to take it on as a project despite it costing more of your time than purchasing an alternative would.
Any time you tell someone to "go fix it themselves," you might as well tell them to go buy the proprietary alternative, because that's the end result anyway.
I love the concept and philosophy of open-source software. But this geek ideal that everyone can just modify the hell out of their own system is false. It's like saying that because your car is made out of steel, if you don't like the design of the Ford Focus this year, you should go to a metal foundry and a machine shop and learn how to design and fabricate car parts so you can turn it into a sports car. Sure, a small number of people can probably do that, but a regular person isn't going to; they're just going to buy a BMW.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's "Gaim"
Using current generation of GAIM (Ubuntu 6.06), I like seeing my entire list of contacts, regardless if they're online or offline. What became quite annoying is how poor the differentiation is between online/offline status. All icons are green regardless, with some subtle differences.
Looking at the icons of GAIM 2.0, I see an improvement, but if the first icon (kind of grayed out) is an Offline icon, and the orange icons are Online, the differentiation is still not as great as it is with Windows Live Messenger.
It is a simple concept, and very necessary IMO.
I personally have been looking forward to using the text based version of gaim. Really helps out since centericq does not allow multiple Jabber accounts. Also gives me the liberty of using the same configuration for a gui based or text based client. :)
Really nice for me because all I run on my X is a xterm (running screen) and firefox. Really do not enjoy to many err... windows. I am still using pine for mail
I could do it. It's a tiny, tiny patch.
But it's not worth the trouble. It creates more potential problems then it solves. Which is why they refuse to do it.
Consider this situation: you are having the client save/enter your password for you, and then you forget it, and try to get it back from accounts.xml, only to find out it's XOR-encrypted with some stupid string. So you have to go download the source code and find it to crack your own stupid password, because you want to change it and stop having it get entered automatically, because it isn't secure stored on a memory key anyway!
Unless you use TrueCrypt, but then it wouldn't matter if it was encrypted or not to begin with.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
http://www.rvantwisk.nl/news/item/archive/2006/aug ust/article/ot-compiling-gaim-200-beta-3-on-os-x-1 047.html
This guy posted how he got it working in OS X with fink. Enjoy!
First, will it have audiovisual upgrades for Google Talk and Windows Live. Second, why would I use it vs. Miranda?
I wonder what the recent developments will mean for adiumx. The adiumx betas have been pretty nice but the builds are so huge because of debug stuff that I had to switch back to stable. I know adium uses libgaim so I hope that as gaim improves adium continues to as well
Chaos is Divine *
To say that I am pissed that Gaim hasn't incorporated video support is an understatement. I would like to video chat with friends and relatives over Yahoo IM and MSN and AIM. It irks me that Gaim-vv isn't being developed or supported and that video support hasn't been even considered for inclusion in Gaim. Gaim should be forked/improved by a linux distrobution (hello, Ubuntu?) to include video webcam support! Is it so technically complicated?
No, really, just...mods on crack...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I've been frustrated with gaim, so I tend to use meebo for chat these days (which actually uses gaim as the back-end, but that's not the point).
The only differences between Gaim versions seem to be UI improvements. I've been using gaim for several years now, and they re-design the interface every minor version. It looks different now that it did three years ago, but there is absolutely no additional functionality. How the hell does the #1 project on sourceforge for three years not have voice chat yet? Also, I've also never been able to successfully transfer a file from gaim to AOLIM.
Once upon a time I tested Gaim on Windows, and was quite amazed to see my password written to the hard disk drive in clear text. If I recall correctly it was even in the program folder. "Delete" was the only thing I did for Gaim after that... never, ever again.
Okay, so I see that there were no voice features implemented into the various protocols, at least not yet. Are the Gaim developers ever planning to make other features work that they already tried to implement? (like Direct Connections on AIM for sending files in the window.) And though the file transfer on AIM seems to be working better than it used to, it still can't resume files that were being sent to others, (very annoying when trying to send large files and get a disconnection.)
So they've *finally* gotten file transfer working on aim? I'm glad that they did this, but why the hell did it take so long? This is a bread and butter feature... Now how long will we have to wait for working voice chat that all the proprietary clients already support?
For such a widely used utility, I've always wondered why gaim development progressed so slowly. Since it doesn't support things like aim file transfers and voice chat, most people I know still stick with an old (and lighter weight) version of AIM, even though it sends them ads. Maybe once gaim 2.0 comes out of beta, I'll be able to finally convince them to switch.
Ok well then he should donate money to the gaim developers or sponsor them in some other way. There are other ways to help out.
Definitely! This is one reason that I dislike the "code it yourself" response, because I think it turns people off and makes them believe that if you don't read and write and breathe C, you'll never have any impact or value in OSS development. There are lots of ways to help out, including straightforward financial donations, which are open to many more people than actual coding is.
However, you don't hear about them very often, and a lot of open source projects are set up in such a way that it's more difficult to get involved if you don't have the ability to read code. For example, on a commercial software product you can have an army of testers banging away at software even when it's in development, because you have human-readable specifications that you test against. I've yet to see any specifications on an OSS project, and many programmers think they're a waste of time. The net result is that people who can't read code aren't worth a whole lot. (Which surprised me, coming from a commercial development where we probably have a 3:1 ratio of non-coding analysts and testers for every actual developer, without counting management or dead weight.)
So I think there are multiple levels to the problem. People need to be encouraged to help out projects and make them more useful, but projects also need to be designed from a perspective that's scalable and doesn't assume that everyone can check out the code from CVS and start doing useful stuff with it. Because most people just can't.
On the user's side, people need to get rid of the lingering attitude that "if I wanted to pay for software, I'd just use Windows." There's a happy medium between getting screwed through the nose for commercial software, and using somebody's work without compensating or helping them, and making it more likely that the project will die. In the latter case you're really killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs.
Anyway, it's a complex issue, and I didn't mean for my earlier post to oversimplify and put blame on OSS devs unfairly. However, in the places where OSS has become mainstream, it seems like the same issues and conflicts come up again and again between coders and non-coding users, and I think both sides have some responsibility for making it easier on the other.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You mean they're ensuring strict adherence to policies on Free Software whilst continuously fixing bugs on 11 different architectures and adding new software with complex interdependencies and retaining backwards compatibility and easy upgradability? Great!
Someone should update the listing of GAIM on Compare IM with all these cool new features.
Gaim 2.0 supposedly supports Bonjour (or Rendezvous, or whatever it's called). Has anyone ever gotten that to work?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
It's been around for a while, but not stable as far as I've known. Beta v3 has crashed on me several times (where 1.5 is still rock solid for me). And these are fun crashes where you have to manually kill the 'hidden' gaim.exe from the Task Manager before restarting it. Instead of new features, I'd appreciate more stability than feature enhancements to 2.0. If 2.0 is released with the same bugs, I'll have to end up switching to something else.