Gaim: an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client for Linux

There was a time, believe it or not, when anybody who dared to run Linux on
their desktop PC had to struggle in order to find the tools that were common
in the Windows environment. Applications such as Quicken, Word Perfect or
MS Word, Excel, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger did not have any equivalent
in the Linux world. Of course, the UNIX world itself was also affected by
the same problem. It appeared as if this was a world where only developers,
system administrators and scientists had a place and UNIX and Linux
workstations were used to… well, work.

But these days all this situation has changed quite a bit. Linux has moved
to the center stage, and many people even view it as an alternative to
Windows and the MacOS. More and more people are using it not only at work
but also at home. Linux developers have managed to either port the
applications we just talked about, or cloned them in some cases. Then,
there are also some other instances where they managed to create something
that was even better than the original Windows application. The world
of instant messaging could be an example of the latter. Not only did
Linux developers manage to port these applications to Linux (e.g. the
Java version of AIM
released by AOL itself), but in some other cases they managed to come up
with pretty good clones (e.g. the
Gaim client that we review here, or
licq), and even innovate with a whole new approach to the subject
matter such as Jabber. Whoever said
that open source cannot be creative!

In any case, we\’ll limit ourselves to the Gaim client in this review. The
installation of the app itself is pretty easy, and the fact that there are
several packages available makes it even easier. You can choose to
download the source code in a tarball and compile it youself, or perhaps
obtain a binary RPM (for either the i386 or the PPC architecture) or a source
RPM that you can compile. I couldn\’t see any other packages available on
the
main site but there are also at least .deb packages available elsewhere.
But before you even try to download and install the program, check out and
make sure it is not already installed on your system. Many distributions
already install it by default these days.

Once installed, you can run Gaim either from the menu (it should be in
the Internet menu within Gnome) or from the command prompt by entering the
command \’gaim &\’ (don\’t forget that ampersand to put it in the background!).
You will first see the login screen, which should look pretty familiar to
you if you ever ran the old Windows AIM client.