InformIT: Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, or IM as it is often referred to, provides you with several nice features, the first of which is an easy way to see when your friends and chat buddies are online and available for communication. Instant messaging also allows you to send messages directly to your friends to which your friends may reply immediately or when they feel like it. Different instant message protocols offer different features, but in the end they all supply more or less the same basic functionality.

There are Linux clients available for most of the instant message protocols. Included with your Red Hat system are clients for the two most widely used: the ICQ and the AIM protocols. There are also Linux versions of several other instant messaging protocols. For example, there are clients for Yahoo IM. However, these are not included with Red Hat 7. If you need to get a hold of such a client, you might want to check out http://freshmeat.net/ and use their search engine do a search with Yahoo as the keyword.

ICQ

The concept of instant messaging, as it is known today, was more or less pioneered by Mirabilis, Ltd. The founders of the company had noticed that while more and more people connected to Web sites, they did not interconnect with each other to the extent that the Internet would allow. They thought that this was because of a shortage of components to enable interpersonal communication on the Internet. To remedy this situation, they formed their company in 1996 and began developing their own chat program. At the end of 1996, only four months after the company was founded, they released the first version of their chat system—ICQ (pronounced "I seek you"). It instantly became very popular and the number of users soon snowballed into hundreds of thousands. In June 1998, AOL acquired Mirabilis and it was restructured into the current company, which is called ICQ, Inc.

If you are totally new to the concepts and features of ICQ you might want to visit ICQ, Inc.'s Web site at http://www.icq.com/. There you will find plenty of beginner's guides that will explain ICQ in detail. It is a bit slanted toward their own client and Windows, however the concepts are the same in the Linux counterparts and most of the available options can be found in the ICQ client discussed in this section. ICQ, Inc. does not have a version of its client available for Linux, however there is a Java version, which you might want to use if you feel that you have to use the original client rather than a clone. Do note that the Java version is quite slow and uses lots of your computer's resources.

`licq`

The ICQ client included with Red Hat 7 is called licq. It is a very good, fully featured clone of the ICQ client. Apart from allowing you to chat, it allows you to send messages, URLs, files, contact lists, and so on. All this comes packaged within a nice GTK+ interface. See Figure 7.5 for a screenshot from a typical ICQ session.

Figure 7.5 A typical ICQ session with licq.

Creating a New ICQ User with `licq`

When you launch licq for the first time it will present you with a registration wizard. Here you can either register a new account on the ICQ server or connect to an old, existing account. Accounts are assigned numbers. Once you have logged on to an old account, or created a new one, you will be able to update your personal information, which will be stored on the ICQ server and can be seen by anyone. See Figure 7.6 for an overview of some of the information that may be supplied.

Figure 7.6 The personal information dialog of licq.

Sending and Receiving Messages with `licq`

After you acquire an ICQ number you will want to start chatting with someone. To do this you need to have the ICQ number of someone else who is online. When you have this, you will want to use the Add User option from the User Functions menu. This will pop up a dialog that asks you for the ICQ number of the user you wish to add. As soon as you have added some users they will show up in the user list of licq's main window. If you want to you can include chat contacts into different groups. To send a message you only have to double-click on the ICQ number that corresponds to the user you are trying to contact. A new dialog window will open up. See Figure 7.7 for an example of how this might look. Type your message into the text box and then click Send to send it. If it's not possible to send the message directly to the recipient, the client will ask you if it should be sent via the server. This can be useful when your chat buddies are located behind a firewall that does not allow direct access.

Figure 7.7 The Message dialog window from licq.

The licq client will notify you when you receive an incoming message. Depending upon how you have configured the client, this can come in the form of the system playing a sound, a change in color on the username from whom the message comes, or else a window containing the new message can instantly pop up. When you received a message and are looking at it, you will see something like Figure 7.8. Using the command buttons in this dialog you can reply to the message or initiate a chat session with the user.

Figure 7.8 The incoming message dialog window from licq.

Configuring `licq`

The licq client is very configurable, as you can see in Figure 7.9. You can configure everything from how the client should behave when an incoming message arrives to how to treat URLs and similar material. You will probably find that the default settings are a very good starting place. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to modify the client to suit your needs once you are comfortable with ICQ.

Figure 7.9 The configuration dialog window for licq.

Other Features of `licq`

There are several more features of the licq client. Using the selections available on the status menu, you can change your status to being everything from Free for Chat to Offline. You can also search for an ICQ user based on many different criteria.

You can also choose to join chat groups on the ICQ. These are a little more primitive than their IRC counterparts. However, sometimes there are quite a few people in these groups and you might very well find a nice group of peers to communicate with within one of these chat groups.

AIM

AIM is an acronym for AOL Instant Messaging—yes, it is an acronym within an acronym. This instant messaging protocol was created by AOL before it acquired ICQ and AOL is now maintaining and supporting both protocols—unfortunately the protocols are not compatible with each other. AIM is one of the fastest growing IM standards today and there are well over 90 million registered AIM users. Because AOL owns both AIM and ICQ, you can probably guess that it is the largest company in the instant message business.

As of this writing, AOL has a Linux AIM client in beta testing. However, it is not yet finished and it is not included with the Red Hat 7 distribution. There are, however, several clones of AOL AIM client available, one of which we will examine in this section.

`kit`

The AIM client that comes included with Red Hat 7 is part of the KDE desktop environment. It is called kit, which stands for KDE Instant Messenger, and it aims to become a fully featured AIM client. At the moment it is not quite there because the KDE team began developing it quite recently, however they are quickly adding features to it. You can run this client even if you are running the Gnome Desktop; that is, as long as you have installed KDE as well, or at least the necessary components from KDE. See Chapter 5, "Window Managers," for more information on this.

Creating a New AIM User with `kit`

It is possible to maintain several different profiles in kit, each connected to a specific AIM user. Each profile can, apart from an AIM username, have totally different settings, user lists, and so on. If you choose to add a new profile in the Profile dialog, you will be asked if you want to connect to AOL and create a new account. If you choose to do so, a new Web browser window will be open directed to the AIM user registration site. (See Figure 7.10.)

Figure 7.10 Creating a new AIM user.

After being prompted for a name for the new profile, you will be presented with the configuration dialog in which you can supply personal information about yourself (see Figure 7.11). There are also several other options that you can use to configure kit to your personal liking, such as the appearance of kit and how you are connected to the Internet. You can also add buddy groups and insert the AIM nicks of your friends.

Figure 7.11 The configuration dialog of kit.

Sending and Receiving Messages with `kit`

It is easy to send a message using kit. You just need to double click on the nickname of the user to whom you want to send a message. You are then presented with a new chat window. See Figure 7.12 for an example of an ongoing discussion. It is possible to change the appearance of your message using the button widgets; for example, you can change the text color and the background color. There are also tool buttons in the dialog that will, for example, show information on the user you are chatting with, toggle the sound off or on, and toggle logging of the conversation on or off.

Figure 7.12 An ongoing chat using kit.

You receive messages in the same manner as you send them. When an incoming message arrives, the same chat window as in Figure 7.12 pops up with the new message and you can then reply in the same manner as if you had initiated the chat yourself.

Other Features of `kit`

At the moment there is not much functionality available in kit. You can toggle your status between online, offline, and away, and you can also search through the AIM directory for users using quite a few different criteria (see Figure 7.13). Apart from these features there really is not much more at the moment. However, the basic chatting capabilities are all available in the client and they work excellently. kit is sure to become much more improved as time goes by.