Here at work, I am behind a rather restrictive proxy/firewall setup which prevents me from using IM clients like AIM, YIM, and ICQ (I actually use Trillian at home.) Well, being the chatty guy I am, I am looking for ways around this limitation. I can, through our telnet proxy, telnet into my Linux box at home. I found a program called Ari's Yahoo! client which is a command-line client for Yahoo Messenger that is pretty dodgy, but sometimes works. However I haven't found any solutions for the other IM clients, and this client's interface is less than ideal.

So, I've heard about something called Jabber, which supposedly unites several of the IM protocols, and allows you to connect with various clients. I don't have much knowledge of the details of it though, and I'm curious as to if anyone here uses Jabber, has any experience with any Jabber command-line clients, and can tell me if it's the right solution here. If there is some other all-in-one command-line IM program for Linux that I haven't seen, I'm all ears.

Thanks.

centericq is cmd line (ncurses) which does icq, yahoo, msn, jabber and a few others.

for AIM I use bonim

hm, guess I haven't checked for updates for centericq (btw, here's the link ) in a long time. i'm 2 versions out of date and they now support AIM along with some new features i'm going to now play with

Wow, centericq pretty much rules... Very nice features.. Except that I try to connect to Yahoo and immediately get disconnected for some reason. Still playing... Thanks for the tip, though, it looks like a great client.

Damn, still can't figure out how to get Yahoo working... Is it working for you? Here's what I get in the centericq window:

+ initializing yahoo engine            

+ [yahoo] connecting to the server     

+ [yahoo] logged in                    

+ [yahoo] disconnected from the network

.
Any thoughts?

It's possible that Yahoo has figured out how to block that particular non-authorized IM client. Any time you use a third-party IM client on Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or AIM, it's a constant battle between the big company's electronic countermeasures, and the little developer's updates to work around them.

Yup. Having used Trillian for quite some time now, I'm aware of this. Same problems back when MSN Messenger was connecting to AIM.

it's a constant battle between the big company's electronic countermeasures, and the little developer's updates to work around them.

Except with MSN ironicially enough. The last update for Trillian was done due to MS contacting them and letting them know of an upcoming change to the servers that would have broken Trillian's MSN part.

Of course to do otherwise would look odd when MS has been trying to get AIM compatibility for ages now.

I wish these children would just play nice and come up with an interoperable standard.

But that would thwart many opportunities for the non-interoperable leaders (AOL and MS, mainly) to make money.

And they're making money on IM right now? Shyeah, right.

The only money they're making is imaginary money, by saying "people sign up and pay for our service because of our superior proprietary IM system". They're justifying it now, hoping that one day it'll turn around and that their advertising revenues will eventually begin turning a profit, but that'll never happen. We've already seen the bottom fall out of the internet advertising market.

When are companies going to realize that the only way to succeed with communications networks is to have open standards? Proprietary systems have always collapsed under their own weight. Chrissakes, people, this is communication we're talking about here. How do you expect people to communicate if you lock them out?

Actually, AOL has ads on its AIM client. I'm guessing that's bringing in revenue... I doubt it makes a profit in light of what it costs to maintain the AIM servers and write the software and such, but it's a source of income that's gone if people use Trillian or any other non-AOL IM client.

I agree with the rest of your comments, though.

centericq works great for me with icq, aol and msn. What a cool little toy. Thanks for the link.

hm... can't seem to logon to aol or yahoo with it. msn and icq work fine

Thanks for confirming my suspicions about dodgy Yahoo support... Maybe I'll sign up for the centericq mailing list and see what the deal is..

Hi All

Yesterday I had a weird idea:
What if you could compile & run any kind of commandline chatclient on the Empeg, and you could make it automatically sign-in to the chat service at boot (fx. using preinit).
Then - If your Empeg should ever get stolen you could just wait for it to pop up in the lower left corner of your screen:
"Stolen Empeg" just signed in.....
And if the chat service was ICQ you would also see its IP-address...

And just for fun you could have the Empeg translate its incoming mesages to keypresses fed to the player application ;-)
Or even better - you could display the incoming messages directly on its display: "Hey - you stole my Empeg!"

I know this is a crazy idea, but I find it interesting to get almost any application running on the Empeg :-)

/Nicolai

Any luck on getting info about aol/yahoo from the mailing list?

there were posts about the problem on the centericq mailing list recently.. dunno exactly.. didn't actualy read them

Yahoo is also failing on some of my other chat apps, so it's not centericq-specific. But I don't really use Yahoo chat, so I don't really care to fix it.

The author says that he has added a new Yahoo! engine, but it's only available using the CVS repository, and I haven't had time to try it out yet.

He happen to mention any as to why AOL is not working for me either?

I've tried to install the newest RPM, along with removing that and compiling the tarball. I also found a post about the AOL engine being replaces and a hacked version posted. I tried this version as well with still not luck.

I dunno, you might wanna join the mailing list to ask about AOL. I haven't tried AOL with it yet. I do know the RPM's are behind what's in CVS.

hm, not sure if there's something special i'm supposed to do with CVS versions, but i've gotten a few errors both on ./configure and make.

Sucks because i've been using centericq for years without problem, now I upgrade for the 1st time in about a year and 50% of it isn't working for me.

Well someone on the mailing list said the nightly build tarball on konst's site works better than the CVS tree obtained from "cicqsync" so I tried that and I keep getting some crap about how it can't find libsigc++ even though it's installed. This is pissing me off. I guess I'll wait for an RPM.

Hmm I used the newest RPM (4.7.8) and I'm not having any AOL IM related problems. Seems to be working fine for me (once I remembered the correct password for my AOL ID.) Right now all 5 services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC) are working for me from centericq. What an awesome client! Now I can IM all day at work instead of being productive! And people will see a telnet window! Woohoo!