If you haven't used Pidgin (formerly gaim) then you should give it a try. The USP of the program is that it supports a wide range of Instant messaging protocols.
- AIM
- Bonjour
- Gadu-Gadu
- Google Talk
- Groupwise
- ICQ
- IRC
- MSN
- MySpaceIM
- SILC
- SIMPLE
- Sametime
- XMPP
- Yahoo!
- Zephyr
Now, you *now* know what I am talking about ;o).
Being a fantical lightweight desktop user, I am currently running custom complied Fluxbox as my window manager and I don't use a sound daemon like ESD too.
So when the pidgin package on GNU/Debian suggested that I use gstreamer to play the silly pings and pongs my geek soul quivered.
$ apt-cache show pidgin
Package: pidgin
Priority: optional
....
Some extra packages are recommended to use the core functionality present
in most pidgin installations:
* gstreamer0.10-plugins-base, gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
- Sound support.
.
Instead of installing gstreamer and plugins I decided to use aplay from the alsa-utils packages which also has commonly used alsamixer, amixer.
So in Sound Panel of Pidgins Preferences (see image above) which available under tools menu, I selected the sound method as *command* and sound command as "aplay -q %s".
If you don't want to play any sounds and happy with just console beeps then you can set the sound method to *beep*.
And don't forget to test the sounds by using test button in the *Sounds Events* section below. If you still don't hear any sounds, either the sounds are muted in Pidgin or you must have messed up something.
