aol

have problems opening aim

[linuxnewbie]

When i open my aol instant messanger it goes to the far left of the screen and theres no way i can retrieve it. its like it goes plumb off the screen. Please can someone help with this topic.

[dingman]

What AIM client are you trying to use? What distribution? What desktop environment? (eg, Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, Windowmaker, etc)

Personally, I use Gaim and Everybuddy AIM clients under Debian "unstable" in Gnome 2 with the Sawfish window manager, FWIW.

[senior mcinvale]

no problems with GAIM on RH 7.2+ with KDE, Gnome or WindowMaker.

more system info would be nice :)

[linuxnewbie]

im using the aol client and i use kde desktop it done good for a bit then one day i tried to open it and it went off the page and could not retrieve it. (can i use gaim or kit (aim client) for my aol buddys.

[dingman]

Well, I just tried to download the AOL client, and their Debian package is corupt. *shrug* Gaim works just fine for me, and I seem to recall it picking up my buddy list stored on the AOL servers a while ago. I've never used Kit, but people do so it can't be a complete loss.

I'm not sure AOL has released a decent AIM client for Linux since Tik, which they discontinued. My guess is that they did it because it was written in TCL, which is an interpretted language, and therefore exposed its source code to anyone who downloaded it. They've released a few Java clients since then, and this one apparently uses a modified version of GTK+. I suspect that the root of the problem may be their modified GTK+. You probably have the normal version on your system somewhere, and I'd guess that there's a bad interaction between the two versions of the same library. Especially since I bet that the official AOL client is a badly tested hack, based on the quality of their previous efforts for Linux.

[linuxnewbie]

try this site www.tucows.com/linux and look for the internet/chat/messenger link and you should find the aol clien near the top of the list of messengers. It worked on mandrake 9.1 and redhat 9.1

[dingman]

Not fond of tar archives as a way to install software, and really not motivated enough to deal with one just to test software I don't want anyway. Can you tell us what distribution and desktop envornment you are using? When the window disappears, does any sign of it remain - an entry in the Gnome panel tasklist, for example? Is the processor busy?

[linuxnewbie]

i use kde not to fond of gnome. i am using mandrake 9.1 and when i maximize it its like it dissapears off to the left of the screen and when i minimize it it goes to the task bar.