I can sign on AIM through gaim and start IMing people, however after about 20 seconds, the window freezes and I can't see anyone typing to me, and I can't see anything I type myself. To fix it I close the IM window and the hanging is fixed, but it happens again after another 20 seconds. I looked on gaim's website and it offered this advice:


With 0.60 and higher, try running gaim with GDK_USE_XFT=0 set. If this does not fix the problem, please submit a bug report. If gaim is not crashing, but is just sitting there not displaying anything, try turning off anything else that might be using the sound device (ie xmms) and then starting gaim. If this fixes the problem, it is a libao issue, not a gaim issue, and can be worked around by the use of esd or arts.


I'm kind of new to linux so I'm not really sure how to go about solving this problem even though I have a potential solution right in front of me. For example how do I run gaim with GDK_USE_XFT=0 set? is there a config file somewhere? Also I'm not running this while any audio programs such as xmma are running so I dont think thats the problem, although you never know.

Thanks so much for your help if you can set me on the right track that would be terrific. Thanks !

they seem to be suggesting that you need to set the environment variable GDK_USE_XFT. This is done in the terminal with "export GDK_USE_XFT=0" or "setenv GDK_USE_XFT 0" depending on the shell. the new value will only be set for the current shell, so gaim will need to be started from there (and will then inherit the setting).