AOL s AIM Client

AOL's AIM Client

Now, there are lots of AIM clients for Linux these days, but the MS Windows AIM client works under Wine quite well. It's also a small, network-centric application (and what fun is a computer without an Internet connection these days?). Starting it is quite simple. Change into the directory where it's located ”which in my case is /loki/progra~1/aim95/, and start Wine with an argument of the program name . (As you may or may not know, Program Files can be abbreviated as progra~1 ) I also give my X-window manager control of the application's window, using the -managed flag. So the command looks like this:

cd /loki/progra~1/aim95/

wine -managed ./aim.exe &

Note how I pop Wine into the background. That's because it takes a while to load ”somewhere between 15 seconds and 2 minutes (or more) depending on how fast your hardware is. The newer versions of Wine also seem to load faster than the old ones. Figures 17-1 through 17-3 show what the AIM client looks like under X-windows.

Figure 17-1. Emulated AIM Buddy list.

Figure 17-2. Emulated AIM message.

Figure 17-3. Emulated AIM news ticker.