My wife also works on campus and we communicate through out the day with ICQ (an instant message program that we started using when I was in High School still). Today I decided to try to mimic that functionality in Ubuntu. I had seen a few chat protocols while trying to get other useful things to work so I went to the Applications -> Add/Remove and took a look under Internet I noted that GAIM was on there and it claimed to be a multi protocol chat client. I also found LICQ which looked promising. After about 20 minutes I wasn't making any head way with LICQ so I decided to remove it. It was OH SO EASY to add, but I had to go into the Synaptic Package Monitor and perform a search for it to remove it (had to do the same with Thunderbird, so no sweat really). Then I tried GAIM. I added a user and put in my user name and password for ICQ under screen name and password. This came back with an error so I put my ICQ number under username and moved my user name to the alias box. This worked and that quickly I was back on chat.
ICQ has made some major improvements over the last year and none of those are available in GAIM. It makes the chatting less fun, but I guess it still serves its purpose.
