Gaim and I

Ah... Finally, ITTTSSS ALLLIVVEEE!!!!

** MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAA** <--- Evil laugh

** ahem!! ** (Clears throat). Time for a proper blog entry... ^_^

Anyway, it has been a while since I've tried to do a "hack" of something related to some open source software that I wanted to use. And, today is the day that I've finally been able to get that little "hack" to work.

I've been experimenting with loads of chat applications for a long time, mostly on Windows environments and occassionally, I've been asked if there was a *NIX alternative. For a while, we had to hack our way through Yahoo's Messenger client on *NIX to get it to work. A lot of time was spent, installing and uninstalling (removing all traces via our favourite "rm" command) the darn thing.

So, at around the time when I was fooling around with CentOS, I came across Gaim which was installed by default. (Some guy chose the default install option during the installation process and it was there). At first, we thought that this was a chat client which only supported IRC/ICQ and AOL. After a bit of investigation, we found that it supported the popular clients like MSN and Yahoo!

Of course, we found bugs. We hated them bugs. And because of that, we dropped it. Besides, it didn't offer support for Windows at that time. (We weren't sure if Windows like Gaim... :D). Anyway, some of the developers had switched from Windows to Linux and so, were happy to find that Gaim worked well with both MSN and Yahoo servers. They were happy, but did it work on Windows?

Well, lately, I've been checking out stuff like Trillian since I've not used that in a while and of course, came across Gaim as well. And, to my surprise, it did support Windows! I'd figured that it might, because the GUI was running on the GTK+ runtime. I had always liked the GIMP application, which recently had great support for the Windows platform besides the *NIXes, and thought if that application was already portable to Windows, why not Gaim?

To cut a very long story short. Here is the link to setup Gaim on Windows AND USB Thumb drive!! (cool ain't it??!)

Also, a tip to all those who are using a Proxy server for their Internet needs... According to a mate of mine, it seems that by putting in your Proxy information, you can't seem to connect in. I had a lot of problems but have yet to test this tip out.

BIG BIG TIP - PLEASE DO UPGRADE YOUR GTK+ RUNTIME PRIOR TO INSTALLING GAIM!!