{"id":8432,"date":"2005-01-06T23:47:33","date_gmt":"2005-01-06T21:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2005\/01\/06\/kopete-saga\/"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"kopete-saga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2005\/01\/06\/kopete-saga\/","title":{"rendered":"Kopete saga"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

I have spent a good part of today trying to configure Kopete<\/a> to my likings. Kopete is an instant messaging client that supports a number of protocols – ICQ, IRC, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and others. It is also integrated into KDE<\/a>, which I am using for a few years now.<\/p>\n

Out of all the IM protocols I mainly use only two – ICQ and IRC, and have a registered account in another one – Yahoo. Before my today’s saga with Kopete I was using Licq<\/a> for ICQ and XChat<\/a> for IRC. Both of these programs work fine, but lack any serious integration with KDE. So I decided to try Kopete 0.9.1, the one that was shipped with updates for my distribution – Fedora Linux Core 3.<\/p>\n

So, I fired up Kopete and configured my ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC accounts. Account configuration dialog is pretty straight forward so this part was fast and easy. The moment I asked Kopete to change status of all accounts to ‘Online’ I found the first problem. IRC account couldn’t connect to the server. It was repeating that I was ‘marked as Offline’. Fortunately, I knew about this problem which was related to small socket timeouts settings. To fix this problem, start kcontrol<\/code>, select Internet & Network<\/code> menu and click on Preferences<\/code>. There you will find four timeout settings: Socket read<\/code>, Proxy connect<\/code>, Server connect<\/code>, and Server response<\/code>. Probably you need only the Server connect<\/code> option, but I went as far as increased all four of them to the value of 1800 seconds. After that my IRC account started working just fine.<\/p>\n

Now I was ‘Online’ with all three accounts. It was time to look closer at what I get. Immideately I found the second problem. My ICQ contact list wasn’t syncronized with the server. I searched the web for a bit and browsed through all the menu items, but for no avail. I have about 30 people in my contact list and I almost thought of importing them manually. Not with my hands, of course, but with a script which could read Licq format (a bunch of plain text files) and write Kopete format (XML file). But the problem is that I also use ICQ from my mobile sometimes and there is no way I can syncronize the ICQ contacts with that device. Also, why should I do it when it is supported by the protocl itself? Anyway, I decided to deal with this later and imported about 5 contacts by hand just to play with Kopete.<\/p>\n

I sent a few messages in Englinsh to the friend of mine who was online and it was working just fine. Than I tried to use Russian with another friend of mine. Somehow, he could read my messages fine, but I was recceiving garbage when he was writing to me. I played with fonts and encodings a bit, but nothing helped. I decided to leave this out for some time and continued with other things.<\/p>\n

While playing with encodings, I was also going online and offline back and forth. I also closed Kopete a few times. And there I go with another misbehavior. Kopete couldn’t determine the status of my ICQ contacts correctly, showing a small error icon near all of them and marking all of them as ‘Not Available’. That was bad. I messaged one of the contacts asking if he was available and he said that he was Online. I double checked it with Licq and indeed he was. A bug. A really bad one, driving the whole ICQ support to unusable.<\/p>\n

Fine. I proceeded with IRC. IRC worked good, but I wanted to configure it to look and behave like I wanted it too. Basically, I wanted something very similar to what XChat offers. The XChat theme was shipped together with Kopete so I tried it. It was good but not perfect. I tried to play with colors, but it wasn’t enough. So I copied the XChat theme to Leonid and tried to Edit<\/code it. Theme editor is nothing else, but a simpliest of all text editor with some XML file in it. XML wasn't a complete thing either, it defenitely had some fields and values which should have been documented somewhere. I managed to make a better theme, but it still wasn't perfect.<\/p>\n

At this time I was pretty disappointed with Kopete and there was only a small chance that I would continue to use it. The last thing that I tried to configure was notification management. What I tried to do is not to have any notifications for IRC, but have immidate focus switch and raised window for ICQ. That proved to be impossible. The best I could do is no notifications for IRC and a ‘New message’ ballon from the taskbar for ICQ.<\/p>\n

That was enough. I closed Kopete, fired up Licq and XChat back again and decided that I will not touch Kopete for another couple of years, until it will get much better. Sad but true.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n

I have spent a good part of today trying to configure Kopete to my likings. Kopete is an instant messaging client that supports a number of protocols – ICQ, IRC, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and others. It is also integrated into KDE, which I am using for a few years now. Out of all the IM … Continue reading Kopete saga<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,62],"tags":[],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-8432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8054,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/10\/14\/on-instant-messaging\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":0},"title":"On instant messaging","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 14, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Pretty often I get complains from certain people that it is impossible to chat with me online in real-time. The thing is, I do use only two protocols for instant messaging: ICQ and IRC. IRC is by far my favourite one. I like joining a channel or two for a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10958,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2007\/12\/06\/passing-messages-between-google-talk-and-icq\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":1},"title":"Passing messages between Google Talk and ICQ","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"December 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Recently Google announced that GTalk users can now communicate with AIM users.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn't mention it here and, in fact, didn't pay it much attention since I don't use AOL Instant Messenger.\u00c2\u00a0 Why do I suddenly come back to this announcement?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, because my memory played a Grand Failure Play\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10949,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2007\/12\/04\/im-interface-idea\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":2},"title":"IM interface idea","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"December 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"For this or that reason, I'm chatting (ICQ\/Google Talk) to a lot of people recently.\u00c2\u00a0 Often I do a few chats simultaneously.\u00c2\u00a0 It's easy to get used to after some time.\u00c2\u00a0 But one thing I noticed that annoys me, is that chat windows take a lot of screen space and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9602,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2005\/10\/23\/sim-bug-cleared-up\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":3},"title":"Sim bug cleared up","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 23, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been enjoying my Sim ride for some time now. With more confidence in it, I explore the menus and look for more features and configuration options. One of the things that I noticed is support for Yahoo! Messenger. It's not on the list of features, but it is in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7560,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/06\/09\/p800-updates\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":4},"title":"P800 updates","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"June 9, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"It has been a long time since I checked the SonyEricsson P800 scene. Meanwhile there were plenty software updates and a lot more media content published. I've spent a good deal of today downloading all sorts of sounds and pictures, testing new software products and updating the old ones. Out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8279,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/12\/02\/in-south-korea-email-is-for-old-people\/","url_meta":{"origin":8432,"position":5},"title":"In South Korea, email is for old people","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"December 2, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"This story kind of makes me feel old. Email is by far my primary way of electronic communication. I use ICQ and IRC occasionally too, but a lot of young people that I know - don't. Go figure. 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