REVERT TO CONSOLE

I can finally sleep at night now that I have a command-line solution for Google Talk.

What’s needed (for a poor windows user):

• Mcabber, a jabber client from http://mcabber.com
• Cygwin, http://cygwin.com
• Ssh package for cygwin, if you need to install mcabber elsewhere and then connect to it remotely.

If cygwin and ssh are new to you, read this to get up to speed.

If you are setting up mcabber on a host machine, you’ll want to setup ssh as a service or daemon on that machine as well. Use the ssh-host-config script to do that.

Quickly, here’s how to get going.

1. Get the latest updates for cygwin using the cygwin setup program. I was missing the latest glib and I didn’t have pkg-config.
2. Download the mcabber source from the website. Run the configure script with no arguments. Take note of any errors; they are most likely related to missing libraries. Get these libraries with the cygwin setup program.
3. Once configure is successful, you should be able to run make, and then make install with no problems.
4. Create a mcabberrc file in the directory ~/.mcabber, note that the filename is “mcabberrc” and not “.mcabberrc”.
5. Put the following into the mcabberrc file to configure it for Google Talk.

set username = <your username at gmail dot com>
set server = talk.google.com
set ssl = 1
set ssl_verify = 0
set port = 5223

That’s all there is to it. Type mcabber and it should prompt you for your password and then connect.

You’ll see 3 different “panes” or frames and the command prompt at the bottom. Scroll through your contacts with Page Up and Page Down. When you’ve selected a contact, just start typing in the command prompt to send messages. The program commands start with a “/” character, type “man mcabber” for a complete list of commands. If you’re in mcabber, you can type “/help” for help on specific mcabber commands.

That’s all for now!

-eokuwwy