Instant Messaging with Gaim

The Web is great for one-way communications: someone posts a web page and someone else views it. Even in online forums, discussions may span days. E-mail is a faster communication method, and is bi-directional, but is not instant. Instant messaging (IM) systems allow realtime communications with groups of people.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of the first IM protocols. (IRC predates most IM protocols by more than a decade.) There are plenty of IRC clients for Dapper, including the graphical xchat and text-based irssi. But IRC is only one type of IM protocol available today. Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Napster all have their own IM protocols. Beyond proprietary systems, the open-source Jabber protocol is growing in popularity; Jabber is essentially IRC over an encrypted channel.

Although you could download a specific IM client for every protocol, it is much more convenient to have one client that supports them all. Gaim in an IM client that ships with Ubuntu and supports eight of the most common IM protocols. To run Gaim, go to Applications Internet Gaim Instant Messanger. When Gaim first starts, you will need to add an account. Accounts specify IM servers and your identities on each server (see Figure 5-11). Each server protocol has different requirements that you will need to specify.

Figure 5-11: Adding an IM account to Gaim

After creating an account, you can log in to the account-this connects to the server. From there, you can join chat rooms and communicate in real-time. Although Gaim does not allow you to bridge between IM connections, it does allow you to connect to many different servers at the same time.

Tip 

Gaim uses many different windows and there is no central text menu for opening a specific window. To see the list of windows, right-click on the yellow Gaim icon that appears in the top panel. This will pull up the main menu and allow you to see accounts, chat windows, and even exit the application.