[SunHELP] AOL Instant Messaging (AIM)

[Rodney Sparapani]

I had heard that gaim was the way to do AIM on Solaris.  Now that AOL is 
offering free accounts, I decided to try it.  But, there has to be a 
better way.  Can anyone see a short cut?  Here's what I found:

1) GCC cannot be used; rather Sun Studio must be used

2) I've got the GNOME Desktop v2.0 package from Sun installed in /usr

3) And ActiveStates Tcl v.8.4 is installed in /usr/local/lib, but for 
some reason the include8.4 files are not installed by default, so I 
copied them to /usr/local/include

4) From past experience with other GNU projects, a few other settings 
are very helpful:
CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/xpg4/bin/sh
CPP=/opt/sfw/bin/cpp (from the Companion CD)
CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/sfw/include
LDFLAGS=-L/opt/sfw/lib

5) GNOME requires libiconv and freetype2 to be installed

6) Other GNOME libraries are needed.  GNOME Desktop comes with
glib v2.0, but it doesn't come with the others which you can find @
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.0

You can run into trouble with two versions of GNOME libraries installed, 
so I put everything in /usr (you will also need to install pkg-config 
which helps configure with this kind of thing).

I think the correct order of installation was:
libpng, libjpeg, libtiff (in dependencies)
atk
pango (there is a libtool bug which you can workaround by linking
	/usr/local/lib/libiconv.la -> /usr/lib/libiconv.la)
gtk+

6) gaim configuration was a little tricky.  With v. 1.5.0:
configure --prefix=/usr --disable-audio --with-static-prpls=oscar \
--with-libiconv-prefix=/usr --with-tclconfig=/usr/local/lib/tcl8.4 \
--with-tkconfig=/usr/local/lib/tk8.4 --disable-perl --disable-rpath \
--disable-nss

7) gaim works perfectly, however, when I logged out and tried to log 
back in, my GNOME session would die immediately and send me back to the
login window.  So, now you have to do the following with GNOME Desktop:
remove
install

This last step takes about 20 minutes and should not be necessary; any
ideas?  For me, that was actually the easiest step, but it is time 
consuming.  After that, everything should work.  I found it best to get 
my AOL account first and test it out on Mac or Windows first to make 
sure everything was working, otherwise, you can't tell where the problem is.

Enjoy,

Rodney