Instant Messaging on Ubuntu
When you install Ubuntu 7.04 an Instant Messaging program called GAIM gets installed on your computer as well. It’s a pretty handy multi-protocol application that will let you connect to various IM programs (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ). The only problem for me is that there is no built-in support for GoogleTalk.
A little bit of research led me to find that GAIM has been renamed to Pidgin for various legal reasons and Pidgin now has support for Googletalk’s protocol. The down side is that Pidgin does not currently exist in the Add/Remove programs library. A quick google search led me to jhcore.com’s article about installing Pidgin on your Ubuntu machine. The instructions do use command line, but are actually very easy to use.
The only issue I found is that they’re slightly out of date, referring to a slightly outdated version of pidgin. The good news is that by swapping the version number that is shown in jhcore’s instructions for the current version, you get the most up to date install of the application.