I am very much used to GTalk in windows that, when I moved to ubuntu I was very much in need of it. But gtalk is not available in ubuntu or any other linux platform.
But there is a nice IM client that comes bundled with ubuntu know as Pidgin. Pidgin supports many popular IM protocols and to name a few like AIM, MSN, ICQ, Google talk, Yahoo. It proides a nice environment to use all these different IM protocols from the same interface and at the same time.
I use two accounts one with yahoo and one with GTalk frequently. In windows I have to alternate between Yahoo messenger and GTalk but, in ubuntu we can have both these accounts added to Pidgin and used at the same time.
Pidgin can be found under
Applications =>Internet =>Pidgin
To add an account for use with Pidgin we need to go to the manage accounts screen by selecting
Accounts => Manage Accounts
Select “Add”. In the protocol drop down we have many choices like GTalk, yahoo etc.
In this example lets configure a GTalk account
- Type your username. If your id is user@gmail.com, then username is user
- Fill in your domain name. Domain name is the thing which is after the @ symbol and in our case gmail.com
- For the resources leave the default value of Home.
- Type your password.
We are done. Now go to Accounts => Enable Accounts and check user@gmail.com.
Now pidgin will connect to google server and fetch your buddy list. It has similar options like GTalk for nofiying the status of buddies. We can sort buddies by their name, status etc by going to Buddies => Sort Buddies and selecting the various options.
Pidgin has a very nice feature of integrating with the system menu for setting the various status. When we log into Pidgin we can see that the system menu has the options like Online, Away, Busy etc inaddition to Shutdown, Hibernate etc.
When I am working with pidgin I found that it is taking a lot of time to load the buddy list, some times it doesn’t even load the buddy list with GTalk even after 30mins. Sometimes the connection gets broken down when the speed is low. Apart form these things Pidgin is a wonderful replacement for Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger and many other IMs for ubuntu.
Tags: gtalk, IM, Pidgin, ubuntu, yahoo messenger
