Welcome to the L-F-S *Nix Chat! informational site about *Nix chat clients for Yahoo!
Thanks to dave for adding some colour ;)
This is the starting point of a simple and humble project designed to help Yahoo! Chat users on *Nix based systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc. The idea is to provide docs, downloads, screenshots, and general info to users who want to continue to use Yahoo! Chat when they've migrated their OS to *Nix. The name L-F-S *Nix Chat! is taken from the *Nix chat room on Yahoo! called Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 under the Computers and Internet room catagory. All chat clients listed here are released under GPL or similar licenses. These clients are NOT affiliated with Yahoo!
Here follows some information about Yahoo! chat clients available to *Nix users. I recommend that you should have two chat accounts - one for IM's using a messenger program like Pidgin and another for chat rooms using just about anything else. This means you will have a main IM account that doesn't get spammed and a chat account that can be easily replaced.
Chimp is a code fork of a project called Gyach Enhanced. The author set out with the simple idea of removing the offensive verbose ignore messages which spam chat rooms and making some fixes to major crashes. He has however done more than that and added some important features along the way including whitelist chat and user regex auto-ignores. Chimp can be downloaded here. It's been reported to work flawlessly so if you want Chimp it's a fine time to download it.
GyachE-Improved is another code fork of Gyach Enhanced. As they mention on their page this project was started out of impatience at the inactivity of Gyach Enhanced. GyachE-Improved supports Yahoo! voice and webcam features ;-) For Ubuntu installation there is this install guide available. Thanks to 'silentbob' for pointing out this resource!
Pidgin is a well known multi-protocol instant messaging program for *Nix. It provides a way of integrating all your favourite chat and IM protocols into a single messenger and a single buddylist. This saves memory and screen space and allows more than one user account to connect to Yahoo! at once. This chat client is a real must for those who want good Instant Message functionality on Yahoo! Pidgin does not have an auto-ignore system however and webcams and voice are not yet implimented. I suggest you use something else for chat rooms but keep Pidgin around for IM's, since in that area it really does beat everything else. Pidgin supports plugins! I suggest you check out The Purple Plugin Pack, and look on Freshmeat and Sourceforge for more plugins. The Google Linux search is another indespensible tool. You may even find something for Pidgin that gives you extra privacy/functions in chat rooms that I've missed!
Zinc is a console based chat client written in Ncurses and Python. It is very stable, reliable and functional and can be completely customized! Features include auto-ignores, IM support, reconnect support, whitelist chatting, and other methods of filtering out annoying users and chat bots. This is definately the chat client to use if you like your chat window free of annoying behaviour.
A very good resource to help get you started with Zinc is Natosha's install guide. Once you have Zinc running you can type /help for a list of commands and / for a list of chatters. Once you're comfortable using Zinc I recommend editing ~/.zinc/zincrc in your home directory with an editor. See Zinc Runtime Configs for details!
Zinc also supports transparent backgrounds for versions of Python 2.4 or greater. Here is a screenshot to show how this might look for you. If you can't configure your terminal to be transparent you should install Aterm and have a poke around their site to see how to use transparency. You will have to fiddle with it a little to get a nice configuration but it's worth it. You can edit ~/.zinc/color for finer control if you're confident enough!
Regex name ignores
These are regex-based ignores for Zinc which might also work in other
chat clients. Just edit these to your needs, tastes and so they work
with your chat client. The cryptic looking regexes are designed to
ignore bots
and the simpler ones are designed to ignore chatters who I find like to
IM spam me.
For Zinc: Open a terminal and type
wget -q -O http://lfsnixchat.110mb.com/site-files/regex.ignore.name.txt >> ~/.zinc/regex.ignore.name
If you can't access chat rooms for any reason try the following steps:
If you still can't login on any of your account's check around on some of the websites listed in this site to see if there has been any changes with the way clients login, you may even have to get a newer version of the client you're using. I will try to let you know on this site if something changes with Yahoo! that may break certain clients.
A Private Profile is a profile that does not even appear to exist on Yahoo!
This is a very desirable privacy feature because it makes it look like you don't even exist on Yahoo!
I've noticed that not everybody knows how to do this so I will detail it here:
Other sites you may find useful for Yahoo! chat under *Nix.
Dave's Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 Chat Links who has also linked to me (thanks)!
If you have a *Nix chat client site and you want to link up just talk to Debwalker in LFS:1
I am not a developer of any of the clients listed here so please
don't ask me questions about them - please forward your queries to the
developers.
Please don't ask me for help - this site is intended to help you and if I have something to share it will appear here.
If you have suggestions for something that should go in this site, this
is when and why you should contact me - just talk to Debwalker in the
main LFS:1 chat room :)
The clients listed within this site are licensed under GPL and may be redistributed under it's terms.
Feel free to link to this site.
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
