Fedora Core 6 Review: Gaim 2.0 Beta 4

Fedora Core 6 comes with Gaim 2.0 Beta 4. Above you can see it together with the new Fedora Core 6 DNA-style background.

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit in the appearance of Gaim. The largest change to the GUI involves the availability which is now set by a bar at the bottom of the GUI. The biggest complaint I have with this setup is that there isn’t an easy way to set one account as away while another is available.

On the plus side, it is now very easy to see which picture has been selected as your buddy icon. It shows at the bottom of the GUI near the status widget. I am not really in favor of the beige bar across the GUI by the names of my categories.

The program appears to be a bit more responsive. I’m not sure if this is due to Gaim optimizations or Fedora’s optimizations which came from the GCC flag they used to get FC6 so fast. Other than that, it continues to be my preferred program for accessing all of the chat protocols. I use it even on Windows machines. In fact, the only thing it is missing which, for example, Trillian has is the ability to do voice chat. However, that is slated to be in the final Gaim 2.0 release.

• Fedora