In this highly connected world, its hard to be a part of the Internet community and not use some form of instant messaging (IM) system. Today there are a host of different IM protocols and clients... from the highly popular and feature [over]packed MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, etc... or maybe you're a fan of the old skool and bare-bones IRC protocol, or perhaps even the grand-daddy of them all UNIX "talk". Most of my family and college friends are on AIM, the guys from subText (and some other Microsofties I know) are on MSN Messenger, and since I have a GMail account, I also get to use Google Talk. So, does this mean 3 separate IM clients taking up precious real estate on my desktop? Nope, it means Gaim! Gaim ver. 1.5 is pretty sweet, especially once you configure some of the great plug-ins that the client has to offer. My favorite feature is the ability to have tabbed conversation windows. So if I'm talking to 4 different people, even if they are all on different IM protocols, all the conversations can be contained in one window on my desktop. I love when an app actually gives me back a little real estate!
But, I digress... Gaim2.0.0beta1 has been out for a couple weeks and I've finally had the time (yeah, all of 2 minutes) to try it out. It's a really simple process:
- back up your .gaim directory.
- download the latest bits here.
- Install then configure. Most of my old Gaim1.5 options carried over to the upgrade, so there wasn't much to configure, buy you may have to.
- Enjoy!
So far, I've only had one issue... every now and then when launching Gaim from the desktop icon or opening a configuration window, I get a weird error message.