Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [93]
We haven't yet done anything special to give you a real personality on the Internet (we do that later under "Advanced Configuration"), but you have accomplished enough to communicate.
When you're done, save your account. Back in the Accounts screen, click the Online box. If you have Internet connectivity, it will log you in and you're ready to go. If the login fails, click Modify and check all the items you entered. Did you choose the right protocol? Try re-entering your password.
Chatting
At this point, using Gaim is straightforward. Most people allow IM only with people they know, and only after explicitly adding them to a list of accounts called a buddy list. If you have already added buddies in another client, most services store the information, and they'll show up in Gaim's buddy list.
To add new buddies, pull down the Buddies menu . First add a few groups such as Work, Family, and Political Debaters. (You'll appreciate having groups after a few weeks, when you realize how many people you want to chat with. Some authors of this book chat with family members who are in the next room. Hey, isn't it better than shouting?)
Then add buddies to these groups. How do you find the buddies? Like signing up for an IM account, that's an "out of band" procedure—a computer science term meaning "It's up to you to do it and we don't care how." Most people exchange account names through email or written slips of paper. But one convenient search method for AIM/ICQ is through Tools → Account Actions → Search for Buddy by Email.
To start a conversation, double-click on somebody from the buddy list who's logged in. To start a multiperson chat with two or more buddies who use the same service, pull down the Buddies menu and choose "Join a chat." Here you can pick the service you're using and any name you like; then invite other buddies in one at a time by pressing the Invite button, choosing a buddy from the pull-down menu, and entering a bit of text to let her know what you're inviting her to. You can carry on separate chats with buddies on different services (for instance, AOL and MSN) but you can't combine buddies from two different services in a single chat because each service uses its own protocol.
One of the most valuable features of instant messaging—making it a real business tool, not just a pastime—is the ability to save the text from chats so you can refer later to your "speech acts" (the promises you made). During the chat, choose Conversations → Save As and you can save the text in HTML format. What you save is what has already appeared in the window; if more text you want is added later, you have to resave it. It may be convenient for you to make all chats or instant messages logged by default; you can do this through the Logging item on the Preferences menu, but you will probably end up saving a lot of trash you don't care about.
The HTML in the logs is ugly, but it's sufficiently human-readable for you to extract the text you want later. If timestamps are just a lot of junk to you, turn off timestamping under the Options drop-down menu.
The little boxes with A in them show different types of formatting (italic, bold, and even color) that you can apply: use a mouse to highlight the text you want to change, and click the button. Instead of a button, you can change highlighted text to bold with Ctrl-B or to italic with Ctrl-I, put a strike-through line through it with Ctrl-S, or underline it with Ctrl-U. If something is highlighted and you want to remove the formatting, click the button or Ctrl key again to undo the action.
Long before IM, users of text-only programs such as email, Net news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) exercised a great deal of ingenuity making up the famous little strings such as :-)