One (free) instant messenger for all services

Ajith

– December 1, 2008Posted in: Software

All the web sites having a chat facility has now got an instant messenger client. So a messenger that can handle multiple services was one I was waiting for a long time. I think this would be the case for most of you. But which client would support multiple services as well as run on both Windows and Linux? The answer is Pidgin a free and is distributed under GPL.

Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixs. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr.

Pidgin is the default IM client that comes with Linux(well some distros only – as Saman pointed out in the comments). Almost all of the features of other IM clients are available in pidgin also. But there is no support for video and audio chat. Although file transfer is integrated, most of the time it won’t work (at least when I tried).For pidgin to work properly tyou may need GTK. You can find a version of GTK along with pidgin itself. If not goto GTK for Windows.

One of the main advantages of pidgin is that it can sign in to multiple usernames at once. You can sign in to you GTalk, ICQ, Yahoo… messenger accounts at once. So you don’t need to manage multiples Windows which is a great feature.

PidGin can be downloaded here : Pidgin for Windows, PidGin is available by default in Linux – or install by sudo apt-get install pidgin.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

Posted February 17, 2009 at 8:02 AM

Hi Critic, thank you very much for pointing out the faults.

I think I must be a little more careful about spellings. when I am in a hurry I tend to misspell many words. Also do you think any particular font would be better for the headings.