User:FunkyFish/wip/Documentation/Introduction
From CenterIM
Contents |
Introduction
CenterIM is a text mode menu- and window-driven IM interface. ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM TOC, IRC, MSN, Gadu-Gadu and Jabber protocols are currently supported. It allows you to send, receive, and forward messages, URLs, SMSes and, contacts, mass message send, search for users (including extended "whitepages search"), view users' details, maintain your contact list directly from the program (including non-icq contacts), view the messages history, register a new UIN and update your details, be informed on receiving email messages, automatically set away after the defined period of inactivity (on any console), and have your own ignore, visible and invisible lists. It can also associate events with sounds, has support for Hebrew and Arabic languages and allows to arrange contacts into groups. There is also an internal RSS reader and even a LiveJournal client!
CenterIM is known to build and work well under Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Sun Solaris, MacOS X/Darwin and Microsoft Windows (built with cygwin).
Creation history
This program was written because of a very simple cause. I just couldn't find any console based ICQ clients with really useful user interface. When I started it I had quite a slow computer at home. Having X window running on it took incredibly a lot of resources making whole the system really slow. I didn't like an idea of launching it just to be on ICQ, but there were several good programs only for X. For console they had only mICQ and zicq. The former was ok, but its interface made me cry. I know, it's of quite a UNIX style, and I don't have anything against command line, but typing nicks and uins all the time was terrible. The second thing, zicq, was an attempt to implement menus and windows for ICQ in text-mode, but its author couldn't go further than just splitting the screen into two windows, one with contact list and another with usual mICQ output :) Actually it was all based on mICQ code. I don't wanna say mICQ was bad, for it was the first ICQ client for Linux, and its author made a great job exploring and sniffing the protocol.
After looking at freshmeat and some "icq for linux" pages the hope to find something worth was finally lost. I decided to put some effort into making a program which would be really useful for me. It took me about two weeks to write and then 1 week to test before releasing the first version.
Since that time the software suffered a lot of changes, including rewrite resulted into the version 3.0.0, and then adding more IM protocols since 4.1.0. Now I'm continuing to develop it, going the standard way of adding new features and fixing bugs. And feedback from users helps me a lot in it.
Features overview
CenterIM's ICQ module has almost all the functionality including extended issues that Mirabilis client has. Speaking of other protocols, it has quite full support for features of Yahoo!, AIM, IRC and Jabber.
Beside simple things like sending and receiving messages, changing online status and basic user information, CenterIM advanced features such as "White pages" and keyword search, an ability to update almost all the fields in user's details, send URLs and SMSes, etc. I hope you enjoy it a lot :)
Requirements
In order to build the software the following libraries are required:
- ncurses (at least 4.2 version)
- A CRT screen handling and optimization package.
- http://dickey.his.com/ncurses/ncurses.html
- openssl
- The secure communications library. Optional, but you will require if you want SSL support for Jabber. Previous versions of the library called SSLeay will work with CenterIM too.
- http://www.openssl.org/
- gnutls
- The secure communications library. Optional. An alternative to OpenSSL distributed under the GNU Public License.
- http://www.gnutls.org/
- gpgme
- This is for PGP support in Jabber. Optional also.
- http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/download/index.html#gpgme
Please note that in order to compile CenterIM from source on Redhat based systems you should have *-devel RPM packages of the above mentioned libraries installed.
For more information on the software requirements, take a look at:
It's possible to disable support of various protocols during the build phase. Just take a look at the --disable-xxx parameters for configure. You can invoke the scripts command line help with the following command:
$ ./configure --help
First time start
Upon the first execution, the program shows its configuration screen and then gets to the next stage, the account manager dialog. All the configuration dialog items are self-descriptive, so there must be no problems to customize your CenterIM. As soon as you're finished with it, using the right allow key, move cursor to the "Done" button and press Enter.
Russian speaking users should pay attention to the "Russian translation" item of the registration dialog. It's vital to set its value to "yes" to be able to use cyrillic. In most cases. Unless you use win1251 as a default charset, about what I doubt a lot :) Unfortunately we have two different encodings for our language, koi8-r is default for UNIX like systems and win1251 is used in Windows. Since ICQ comes from Windows we need to recode every sent and received message in order for it to be readable.
