Yahoo Instant Messenger

I have come to depend on Yahoo Instant Messenger for chatting with some of the online communities I am part of. It works great under Windows, but I want to ditch Windows, and this is one of the last few things holding me back. Fortunately, the smart people at Yahoo distribute a FreeBSD version of the program.

Okay, first of all, do not download the thing from Yahoo's web page. It is an older, broken version. Use the ports collection, it is located in net/ymessenger. Also, if your ports collection was generated prior to October 2003, you probably want to update it.

I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1 here at the moment. If you are using FreeBSD 5, the compat4x distribution is required (it looks like the port installs it). I also still had one last missing dependancy. I could probably have fixed it with a symbolic link, but in researching this I discovered the libmap.conf file, so I used that just for kicks. Here is what it looks like:

# /etc/libmap.conf
#
# For Yahoo Messenger
libintl.so.4                            libintl.so.5

The thing seems to support audio events, but when I've tested them, they sound kind of bad. I think someone must have had to convert the data format, and they lost a lot of clarity in the process. I won't complain for now. However, it would be nice if it knew how to access my web cam.