Wael Nasreddine

Lately I have been getting sick and tired of graphical IM, I like aMSN for MSN clients but wait I have 3 MSN accounts, that’s 3 wish’s processes and believe me, that’s too much !! I tried using Pidgin, but I didn’t like it compared to aMSN, If I want to use a graphical messenger I’d like it to be fully featured… I have decided to go to a much more appealing solution, a textual one, but hey I already use mutt for my mail, and ViM for everything I write, So I don’t mind a textual messenger…

As you already know, I have my own server, always running, so I figured why not having the IM client on my server, this way I’ll always be online, anyone can leave me messages, So I have installed Bitlbee which is an IRC server that does the communications between your IRC client and the IM servers, it supports AIM, Google Talk, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo etc…

So now I use Irssi + Bitblee on GNU Screen to chat with 3 MSN, 1 Yahoo and 1 Google Talk account, and beleive me it changes the way you used to chat, well first you won’t have many useless open windows all over your desktop, all your chats will be in the &bitlbee channel on your Irssi, It’s perfect…. but wait a second…. how would I know if someone talks to me ?? since it’s on the server, not on the PC I use, there must be a solution on how to get notifications when someone talks to me right ?? well there is a very good one… ( One that works with a simple Irssi, anyone who talks to me over any channel or in private I’ll be notified… ) …

The idea is to make Irssi write everything addressed to you ( highlighted or via PM ) to an external file,then on the other computer you’ll ssh to the server, read the file line by line and use notify-send to send notifications, here’s a small tutorial on how to do it, I’ll explain both server and client side…

• Server side:
  First download the fnotify.pl perl script (kudos to Thorsten Leemhuis), and put it in your ~/.irssi/scripts folder then make sure it’s auto loaded ( cd ~/.irssi/scripts; ln -s ../fnotify.pl fnotify.pl ), this script will write everything addressed to you in the ~/.irssi/fnotify file, it doesn’t matter if you are marked away or not, which is the desired behavior…
• Client side:
  Download the IrssiNotify bash script, and put it somewhere in your $PATH, make sure you edit it, you need to customize it with the address if the server you would like to connect to, then launch it, if you’d like to launch it automatically when you launch gnome, just put this IrssiNotify.desktop in your ~/.config/autostart folder…
  But hold on, there’s still one issue, if you are online and chatting on Irssi, you will still receive messages from IrssiNotify, I mean that was the whole point of it, to receive notifications whether you are online or away, but I gotta admit, this is annoying… The solution was simple, if ~/.disableIrssiNotify exists, then the IrssiNotify script will simply discard any notification instead of sending it through notify-send… so a simple keybinding was in place, I assigned
  <Ctrl><Shift>d to:

  touch ~/.disableIrssiNotify; notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 10000 -- "IrssiNotify Disabled" "IrrsiNotify has been disabled, to enable it please use <Ctrl><Shift>e"

  and
  <Ctrl><Shift>e to:

  rm -f ~/.disableIrssiNotify; notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 10000 -- "IrssiNotify Enabled" "IrrsiNotify has been enabled, to disable it please use <Ctrl><Shift>d"

  Sorry but I won’t cover keybinding setup thoroughly , you just need to edit /apps/metacity/global_keybindings and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands using gconf-editor, google a bit you will find a lot of tutorials on this subject

I finally have a consistent, lightweight IM messenger, that I can use from any computer via SSH, there’s a lot of benefits, the most important for me are the logs, and the simplicity…. I LOVE IT

P.S: The notification method is not limited to SSH, you could easly modify the IrssiNotify bash script to read the ~/.irssi/fnotify file on your machine, it shouldn’t be that hard

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Internet, Linux, TIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.