FYI SuSE, GAIM, and MSN
 

Talk about a nightmare...
Finally got GAIM compiled from source working and messenger going.
to install it I needed
atk-1.2.4.tar.bz2
glib-2.2.3.tar.bz2
gaim-0.75.tar.bz2
gtk+-2.2.3.tar.bz2 tried with gtk+-2.2.4 but I kept getting an error about a missmatch so I went with 2.2.3
pango-1.2.5.tar.bz2

Once I got all that installed I then got some message about SSL support so I couldn't log in to MSN messenger. :confused:
to Get SSL support with MSN I had to install the following:
gnutls-1.0.6
libgcrypt-1.1.91
libgpg-error-0.6
libtasn1-0.2.6
opencdk-0.5.3

Then after going through the configure, make, etc with gaim again I could log into MSN. :D
Then I realized the sound wasn't working :rolleyes: the only 2 options are console beep and command. Some more searching and I found out if you put "esdplay %s" in for the command it works. :D

Anyway there's what I did maybe it will save someone a good 3 hours... (or next time I start from scratch it will save me 3 hours) :cool:

Why didn't you just use the Software Add/Remove section in ControlCenter/YAST2?

Because it didn't work...
Not really impressed with YAST so far... Now that I think about it I might have just been missing the SSL stuff for messenger. YAST wouldn't install something that won't work would it? :confused:

Why bother doing all this? I used to spend countless hours trying to keep my browser, plugins, messengers,... up to date. It got very time consuming. Until I discovered apt-get for SuSE. Basically, apt-get has packages "ready to go" for your SuSE system. If there any dependencies, it will tell you, download them and install them along with desired package for you automatically. It essentially expands SuSE's YAST and online update (although it is not officially supported by SuSE). It is a very handy tool for keeping your system up to date. Its utility approaches Mandrake's urmpi. apt-get even has a front-end graphical interface called 'synaptic' (I have not tried synaptic).

Go here for more details: http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/

BTW, gaim is having some problems, esp. with the yahoo protocol. Go to their web site (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/) for news, but to save yourself some trouble you can always install/upgrade programs through apt-get, as described above. Dedicated volunteers package the latest and greatest software for SuSE (apt-get is not specific to SuSE; other sites offer apt-get for other distributions).

Hope this helps you save some time.

I went through several problems myself before I finally got this: (RPM for suse 9.0 which gives gaim SSL) http://www.usr-local-bin.org/gaim.ph. It works! it's really simple! Oh, and originally I was doing rpm -i, which gave me some kind of version conflicts, but when I tried rpm -Uvh it worked great!