Sunday, November 06, 2005

Psi cvs (0.10) for SUSE 10.0

Since the release of SUSE 10.0 and from what I had seen from Brainshare 2005, I was curious enough to install it on my laptop. I didn't leave Kubuntu, as I'm still using Breezy on my desktop. I don't know what to think about Novell's decision to go for Gnome as the default window manager for their enterprise products, especially since I'm using KDE for years now, and I like its degree of customization. One thing is for sure, it's easier and cheaper to maintain only one environment, especially if you have to support all choices. But I hope KDE will still get enough attention in coming OpenSUSE releases. Let's wait and see what the future brings :-)

Anyway, back to the topic! ;-) I love to use Psi as an IM-client for my Jabber and MSN contacts (and now also Google Talk contacts). I tried GAIM before, but what irritated me was the lack of seeing your own status (maybe that fixed by now) and Kopete, but I prefer the simple and powerful look and feel of Psi. You can download version 0.9.3 from Guru's website, but Psi 0.10 (which is currently still in development) has a few interesting features like:
  • auto-resize roster
  • tabbed chat windows
  • auto-resize text input
Especially the first 2 are my favorites!

For those of you running (Open)SUSE 10.0, you can download my Psi cvs RPM based on cvs date 2005-11-05.

Psi 0.10 will probably be released soon now, if no critical bugs show up in their test3 release, but this cvs version seemed already very stable.