gaim: protocol not supported

[Jing Su]

Okay, so GAIM does work, but it took a while for me to figure it out.
Here's what I've learned....

1. You MUST upgrade to the 0.71 release.  Previous versions use an older
MSN protocol which will not work.

2. You MUST install the NSS and NSPR packages, which are from the Mozilla
project.

I'm back online on MSN now.

the brief and somewhat unhelpful GAIM faq:
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php

It says that you need SSL.  Unfortunately it uses the wrapped version from
the Mozilla project, not the openssl library; hence needing NSS and NSPR.


For those of you interested, a brif summary of my experience below:


For NSS, they have binary packages for the 2.4 and 2.2 kernels.  I believe
they are statically linked, so they don't have any more dependenciess.
However, I could not find any binary NSPR packages.  NSPR is included in
the NSS source package, so I decided to just download and build both from
source.

I'm on a RH8 base distro, with most of the original libraries removed
and replaced with custom compiled releases of them from source.  So I
guess Chris might have a harder time with this, if his machine is older
and slower.

Here's the NSS download page:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/security/nss/releases/
Here's the NSS build instructions:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/buildnss_331.html
nevermind the different version numbers.  go ahead and grab the latest.
The instructions work the same.

After you build NSS from source, the "make install" directive appears to
do nothing, though you will see lots of console output scroll by.  The
built binaries are in the: ./mozilla/dist directory of the source tree.

I made a directory: /opt/nss-3.8, and copied everything from the
./Linux2.4_x86_glibc directory into there.  I also copied everything from
the ./public directory into /opt/nss-3.8/include.  Very imortant: all of
the files in this "distro" directory are symbolic links.  You should do a
copy using "cp -L", to copy the link target, not just the link.

I then added /opt/nss-3.8/lib to my ld.so.conf file.

Since I already came this far building NSS, I decided to build GAIM from
source as well.  However, GAIM relies on pkg-config for finding NSS and
NSPR, and the source distro for NSS/NSPR does not include a .pc file for
you.  But that's okay, you just have to give more command options to the
./configure script.  I used:

./configure --prefix=/home/jingsu --with-nss-includes=/opt/nss-3.8/include
--with-nss-libs=/opt/nss-3.8/lib
--with-nspr-includes=/opt/nss-3.8/include/
--with-nspr-libs=/opt/nss-3.8/lib/

In the output, when it is done configuring, make sure the SSL option shows
NSS or Mozilla or something.  You need this because the new MSN protocol
requires SSL (NSS wraps SSL) to authenticate and sign in.

Finally, do a 'make' and 'make install'.

Everything should work!

If anyone comes up with an easier way of doing this, please share!


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