GAIM 0.82

[Olaf Olson]

Every now and then, I get a disconnected- try again message when I try 
to connect to Yahoo, with GAIM.  I used to panic when I tried  'yum 
update gaim',  and was told I had the latest. Usually, I pester 
freshrpms.net to get a new one compiled and into the repository.

When I launched 0.79 and found it incompatible with Yahoo, again, I 
decided to try the compile, from sourceforge.net.

Since this isn't installing, but actually building, I was sure it would 
take days, frustrate me, drive me to despair and distraction, and 
generally force me back to commercial OS. The steps were easy:

Get the source - use your favorite method (tarball, gzipped tar, or 
whatever) to download it from the source (Sourceforge!)

Unpack it (gunzip - tar xvf, if you're old and can only remember the 
individual steps) to a sizable temporary directory.

cd to the directory created by the unpacking.

type:  ./configure

type: make     - this does the compiling

type: make install    - this makes it work for you

type: make clean   and make distclean  - this gets rid of the temporary 
files that the compiler used

then run it!

Want to know the real secret to looking like an expert! I learned this 
when I worked at Sears, in the hardware/paint department. You can look 
like the most knowledgeable person in the store, *if* you can read the 
paint cans faster upside down, than the customer can read them right 
side up!

Same rule applies here. Sourceforge has placed all the instructions in 
the INSTALL file, in the installation directory. I couldn't remember 
that, so they set it up for guys like me and created a README file, 
whose name is in nice friendly capital letters, that tells me to read 
the INSTALL file for the instructions!

Anyway, this is an easy compile and will help to build confidence in 
compiling, while giving you that instant message capability. Oh, yeah, 
configure even checks to be sure that you have the correct libraries and 
stuff and will tell you what needs to be "yum update" so that you can 
finish the compile. It will also stop when it hits a snag, but remember 
everything it did up to that point, so you can start again, without 
redoing everything that worked so far.

Olaf

Don't Panic!