Red Hat Knowledgebase

Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with an Instant Messaging (IM) application called GAIM. GAIM works simultaneously with YIM (Yahoo Instant Messenger), AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), and several others. The RPM package name is gaim. To see if you have this package installed, you can use the following RPM query:

rpm -q gaim

If the gaim package is installed, you will see output similar to the following (although your version may be different):

$ rpm -q gaim gaim-0.82.1-0.RHEL3

If you do not have this package installed, you can install this from you installation media. If your system is registered with Red Hat Network (RHN), then you can download and install the package with the following command (as the root user):

up2date gaim

After the installation is complete, you can open GAIM by going to the Main Menu, select Internet, then Instant Messenger or IM.