Instant Messaging on the Microsoft Network

by Eric Foster-Johnson

July 31, 2002 —

With an increased business usage of instant messaging, along with
ever-increasing proprietary messaging systems, the ability to
participate from a Linux system is even more important. Although a
number of companies have tried to ban instant messaging, including IT
giant EDS, other companies have discovered that instant messaging can be
an important tool for communicating with clients. If Linux cannot
participate in this environment, then our efforts to integrate Linux
into both home and business environments are severely damaged.

Enter Alvaro's Messenger
Alvaro's Messenger (amsn) is a Tcl/Tk-based interface to Microsoft's
proprietary messaging system (MSN). Being written in Tcl/TK, it can run
on Windows and other platforms supported by the Tcl interpreter called
wish. Even so, the project page lists that the application is optimized
for Linux and UNIX systems, thus bringing MSN to Linux users everywhere.

Based on an earlier project called Compu's Messenger
(http://messenger.CompuCreations.com), amsn adds a new user interface
and supports quite a few features needed for modern instant messaging,
including email notification, the ability to process URLs in the chat
window, and file transfers. From the main project page (at
http://amsn.sourceforge.net), you can see all the many languages amsn
supports -- from Danish to Turkish, 12 languages all told. Download amsn
from http://sourceforge.net/projects/amsn/.

Alvaro's Messenger is not the only MSN client for Linux, though. Other
MSN tools for Linux include Gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net) and
EveryBuddy (http://www.everybuddy.com).

Gaim interface mimics that of the America Online (AOL) instant messaging
client, AIM. Gaim supports a number of instant messaging protocols,
including AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, and
Zephyr. Gaim uses the GNOME toolkit.

EveryBuddy also uses the GNOME toolkit and supports the AIM, ICQ, MSN,
and Yahoo! and Jabber protocols. Both of these programs give you support
for more than MSN, which could be important in a business setting.

On the KDE desktop front, you can pick from applications such as Kmess
at http://kmess.sourceforge.net/, KMerlin at http://kmerlin.olsd.de/,
and Kopete at http://kopete.kde.org/.

ITworld