Applications that use gtkspell for spellchecking (gaim and xchat) don't have the gtkspell functionality.

I've compiled gaim from source, and it locates gtkspell and compiles with it and everything. I have the option for it to highlight misspelled words, but it doesn't. The same with XChat.

Do I have to set locale, or choose a dictionary or something before it will work correctly, or what?

nobody can help?

So, I figured it out, just thought I would come back and post what I did in case anyone searches with the same problem and finds this thread.

I didn't have any Aspell dictionaries installed, so gtkspell was working fine, but when it called aspell to check the spelling, it came back blank.

So I went to ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict and downloaded the English dictionary, decompressed it, configured it and now everything works fine.

I also fooled around with my locale settings, using both "export LC_AL=en_US" but it wouldn't stick, so I actually edited /etc/default/locale to make en_US my default language.

So, I figured it out, hope anyone that has the same problem does too.