I did eventually get aMSN working yesterday, but this morning, it crapped out again. A bit of googling revealed that it might be a change in the protocol; that MS doesn’t want anyone to use non-MS clients to connect, and they also want to “encourage” people who do use the MS client to update to the latest version, so they make changes in the protocol and non-MS clients can’t connect until they get caught up. Anyway, it probably would have been possible to get aMSN to work again, especially since I updated to the latest SVN version (beta, but apparently stable), but then just for the hell of it, I decided to try Pidgin. At first, it didn’t work, either (did yesterday), so I made a quick check in the Ubuntu forums and the suggestion there was to install pidgin-pecan from the repos, which isn’t “MSN protocol” but rather “WLM protocol”. Once I did that, it worked fine, and since I’ve now discovered that there’s a FB chat plugin for Pidgin (Skype, too), and I found an icon pack that I like because the defaults are fugly, I’m switching to Pidgin, at least for now. The FB chat was really the selling point; I did find the way to pop-out the stupid tiny window in the corner of the FB page, but it’s still crappy, and it takes ages before I notice new messages (or even who’s online) down there anyway (assuming I’m even logged into the web site at all; I do a lot of FB on my phone).

Now, the Ironing Faerie had better stop messing with IM stuff and get to work! 😀

Ah, FFS…another WP update? No time now–maybe tomorrow!