Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software

AOL's AIM Client

Now, there are lots of AIM clients for Linux these days, but the MS Windows AIM client works under Wine quite well. It's also a small, network-centric application (and what fun is a computer without an Internet connection these days?). Starting it is quite simple. Change into the directory where it's located ”which in my case is /loki/progra~1/aim95/, and start Wine with an argument of the program name . (As you may or may not know, Program Files can be abbreviated as progra~1 ) I also give my X-window manager control of the application's window, using the -managed flag. So the command looks like this:

cd /loki/progra~1/aim95/

wine -managed ./aim.exe &

Note how I pop Wine into the background. That's because it takes a while to load ”somewhere between 15 seconds and 2 minutes (or more) depending on how fast your hardware is. The newer versions of Wine also seem to load faster than the old ones. Figures 17-1 through 17-3 show what the AIM client looks like under X-windows.

Figure 17-1. Emulated AIM Buddy list.

Figure 17-2. Emulated AIM message.

Figure 17-3. Emulated AIM news ticker.