Hi everyone.

Sorry to bother you with a topic that's had similair ones posted again and agian on these forums, but I'm trying to get an MSN messenging client that works well with Lycoris (I tried mandrake but it has far too many problems with my modem). I downloaded CD1 from the linuxiso.org site, update 2 I think.

I've tried to do this myself for quite a while, but being a total newbie I have no idea what I'm looking at. Hell, even the documentation for things like gaim and amsn seem like gibberish to me, and the total lack of decent software packages that Lycoris comes with doesn't help either :P

I've already installed openoffice for my word processing with little difficulty, and all I need now to be able to run linux the way I need it to run is an msn client...

Could someone suggest a program for me that's compatible with Lycoris? Preferably with install instructions so simple an utter newbie with no idea what he's doing could understand them?

Thanx!

As of the 15th of October the only way to use MSN Messenger is to use the actual Microsoft client for MSN. Thay have locked out all other clients. Period.

Sorry to contradict you, mcleodnine, but aMSN works with MSN.

To use:
download the file, unzip it (it will create a folder called MSN - this can be done in your home directory), open a terminal, cd to this MSN folder and type in "./amsn" (w/o the quotes).

I have a desktop icon which is a shortcut to the 'executable' aMSN file, there are icon files in the icons folder of MSN.

Yup, gaim also works fine with msn if you compile it with SSL support.

Thanx for the swift replies everyone!

XavierP, I've been trying to run amsn, but whenever I type the ./amsn command I get that error message regarding mapping or some such (If you use amsn you'll probably know what I'm referring to). In the FAQ section it says it's a result of me not having some translation program, but even after I install that I still get the error

Wow. That was quick.

However Microsoft's intent to lock out 3rd party clients has been established.

Bone Gnawer, did you try 'wish amsn'? I believe that's an alternative startup command. If neither option works, could you copy&paste the whole error message into a post.

Mcleodnine - I think that within 24 hours of the cut off date, amsn was up and running again. Such is the beauty of open source! I think that MS will keep doing this (hasn't this happened before?) and the community will keep on doing their thing. Yay open source.

Well, as far as I know, there are the linux clients working with the MSN9 protocol: gaim, amsn, kopete, kmess, any other?

Microsoft, keep trying..

XavierP, yes I did indeed try the wish command, and unfortunately it yeilded exactly the same result

The error message is a little tricky to post since I have windows and lycoris on two different computers (I only have one set of peripherals so I have to reconnect everything to the one I want to use, time for me to just set up a dual boot on my main one), but it's the exact error in the setup section of the FAQ section in the amsn documentation, the one who's answer says to install the translator thingie (real technical, aren't I )

Is it the tcl/tk error? If so, you will need to download and install it.

From the page:
The tcl/tk packages may be on your install cds.

Yes, the tcl/tk problem.

Unfortunately they aren't on the install CD, and I've been trying to install the interperetor for a while now, but no matter what I do, amsn still comes up with the same error

I have bad news. The tcl/tk on Lycoris is either not there or hopelessly out of date. I just searched the Lycoris forum (on www.lycoris.com) for amsn and discovered that someone there is trying to come up with rpms for them, but they haven't provided an update on that for nearly 2 weeks.

So, your options are either to switch to gaim or kopete, etc or try to download and manually compile from Sourceforge.

Off-Topic - is it just me or is it a bit rough that a distro can't keep itself up to date?

Hey thanks for taking the time to look into my problem for me, I appreciate it.

Damn, I didn't realise Lycoris was so out of date with this. It's true that I can't find RPMs for a lot of things for this OS, it is indeed rather shoddy that they can't keep it current. Quite shocking too, considering that they actually try to make people pay for it.

It is truly awful. I would suggest Red Hat, Mandrake or SuSE, if you want something easy to install and configure. It may be that Lycoris have aimed their product at the section of the community who just want it to work and don't really want to add anything to it.

Yes, I just wish Lycoris actually came with an msn client, they have clients for just about every other one preinstalled, one would think that they could at least have added gaim or something...

All I really want, you see, is a linux OS that's simple to operate and that can use office documents, internet and msn. I used lycoris because I was told it was best for the job, but it fails in all areas besides net connection, which it actually does quite well. It only came with kword so I had to download openoffice, and I've been working on getting msn for quite a while now.

I've got Mandrake 9.1 lying around here, but I have more problems with that (it hates my sound card and won't connect to the net most of the time, as well as the many problems associated with unused ethernet cards and graphics card incompatabilities). I might consider getting redhat, but have already wasted lots of time with downloading iso files, so I'll probably give the 48 hour 5k/sec downloads a rest for a while