Linux speaks your instant messaging dialect

By David M Williams
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 18:55

Opinion and Analysis

No matter your flavour of instant messenger (IM) client, Linux has you covered. With the open source program Pidgin you can talk freely.

”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.

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