Empathy has been the default messaging program in Ubuntu since version 9.10, when it replaced Ekiga. It supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application.

For more information about Empathy, see: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy

Installation

Empathy is part of the standard installation, but you can add more functionality/integration with the following packages:

  • SIP: telepathy-sofiasip
  • MSN Live / Messenger: telepathy-butterfly
  • IRC: telepathy-idle
  • Empathy applet: empathy-megaphone-applet

  • Voice & video: libtelepathy-farsight0 python-tpfarsight

  • Other: galago-eds-feed python-galago python-galago-gtk

For example, to install support for SIP, MSN, IRC and voice & video all at once: 

sudo apt-get install telepathy-sofiasip telepathy-butterfly telepathy-idle libtelepathy-farsight0 python-tpfarsight

IRC

Empathy is currently a pretty poor IRC client. It might be better to install xchat-gnome.

If you still want to use Empathy: You need to have at least one non-IRC account. Then you can connect to the IRC server by creating an account.

Help

If you wish to get help regarding Empathy, you can ask your question in the live chat channel #empathy on IRC (Gimpnet). Note that the #empathy channel is specifically for discussing the Empathy chat client. For general help with Ubuntu, continue to use #ubuntu on IRC (Freenode).

Related links

Empathy (last edited 2011-07-01 09:01:52 by 89)