”I didn’t know you could do that in Linux,” I hope to hear you say. Starting today, and for the entire month of October, I’m going back to the basics to talk about beneficial ways Linux can serve your needs.
To kick off, let’s tackle instant messaging. This has fast become a popular means of communication among friends, social groups, even co-workers. You get the ability to send short messages without having to fire up an e-mail client and best of all you have presence awareness: you can see if your buddies are online or not.
Here’s where Pidgin comes in. This product is an IM client, but it’s not an ordinary one. It solves two simultaneous problems.
Firstly, Pidgin is multi-lingual. It will communicate with, and manage, your MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM and other accounts all in the one package. There’s no need for loads of different IM clients. You can control each and every one from within Pidgin.
In fact, Pidgin supports no less than 17 different IM protocols! As well as the four popular ones I mentioned above – MSN, ICQ, Yahoo and AIM – there is Bonjour, Facebook Chat, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, IRC, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP and Zephyr.
Some of these are found in the corporate world – for instance, Sametime is a component of the Lotus Domino suite. Similarly, Groupwise is also an enterprise offering.
CONTINUED
Linux speaks your instant messaging dialect
RECRUITMENT & RETENTION REPORT 2013
HIRE OR FIRE? BUY OR BUILD2013 is well underway and Australian companies need to know whether they should invest in IT skills training or pay a premium for the people they need.
If you want to know which choices are being made in your sector, what skills are hard to find, which sectors intend to hire or fire and where the IT spend is going, this free report is must have.
David M Williams
David has been computing since 1984 where he instantly gravitated to the family Commodore 64. He completed a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from 1990 to 1992, commencing full-time employment as a systems analyst at the end of that year. Within two years, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Newcastle, as a UNIX systems manager. This was a crucial time for UNIX at the University with the advent of the World-Wide-Web and the decline of VMS. David moved on to a brief stint in consulting, before returning to the University as IT Manager in 1998. In 2001, he joined an international software company as Asia-Pacific troubleshooter, specialising in AIX, HP/UX, Solaris and database systems. Settling down in Newcastle, David then found niche roles delivering hard-core tech to the recruitment industry and presently is the Chief Information Officer for a national resources company where he particularly specialises in mergers and acquisitions and enterprise applications.
