Gajim is one of the best IM clients you can find around the web. “Best” doesn’t always come along with multi protocol support or something like that. It’s about a neat xmpp/Jabber client which does support all main xmpp extensions/features and some of most important interface features an IM client should have. Gajim 0.16-rc2, is a little bit buggy on some things but in the end it does what it says. The new update of gajim had two major updates in my opinion, Jingle File Transfer and audio call, which is now available both on windows and linux(Gajim 0.14). Additionally, last message correction, attention, blocking command and direct MUC invitations are now supported too.
I’ve tested gajim both on Ubuntu 14.04LTS and windows 7 and made some audio calls between the two clients. I found it a little bit weird the fact that the receiver of the call won’t be notified with any sound alert and neither the sound can be set from preferences section. The caller also won’t be notified that his call has been initiated or the receiver responded (except a small symbol on the right top corner of the chat window-which can’t be considered as anything in my opinion).
Gajim IM Features
- Tabbed chat window and single window modes
- Group chat support (with Multi-User Chat protocol), invitation, chat to group chat transformation, minimize group chat to roster
- Emoticons, avatars, PEP (user activity, mood and tune)
- Audio / video conferences
- File transfer, room bookmarks
- Metacontacts support
- Trayicon, speller, extended chat history functionalities
- TLS, GPG and End-To-End encryption support (with SSL legacy support)
- Transport registration support
- Service discovery including nodes, user search
- Wikipedia, dictionary and search engine lookup
- Multiple accounts support
- DBus capabilities. Read more information
- XML console
- Link local (bonjour / zeroconf), BOSH
- Other features via plugins
- Gajim is available in 29 language
Install gajim 0.16-rc2
Download nbxmpp python library (needs intltool>= 0.40.1)
Download & install intltool_0.50.2-2_all.deb (open it with software center or dpkg)
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tar jxvf gajim-version.tar.bz2 cd gajim ./configure make sudo make install |
Enable audio/video features
In order to enable audio/video features of gajim you should install gstreamer-plugins-bad and python-farstream. Restart gajim right after the installation is completed.
Download gstreamer-plugins-bad and open it or
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apt get install gstreamer-plugins-bad |
Install python-farstream
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apt-get install python-farstream |
Enable Bojour/zeroconf feature
Bonjour is apple’s implementation of zeroconf which allows applications to autodetect other clients running the same services on the same local network.
To enable bonjour feature you should install python-avahi and restart gajim right after the installation is completed.
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apt-get install python-avahi |
Enable UPnP-IGD feature
UPnP–IGD feature gives gajim the ability to request your router to forward ports for file transfers (requires python-gupnp-igd).
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apt-get install python-gupnp-igd |
Note: If you wan to check if the installation was successful and the features are enabled, open gajim’s main window -> Help -> Features. It should look like the image below.
