Transcription:

Hey everyone. This is Will from Be Your Own IT continuing on with the Linux tutorial. After we’ve gone through and solved the system and we’ve gotten some software installed, there’s also some other features that actually come with the operating system that I can show you a little bit here. Ubuntu 10.4 comes with some social networking and chat integration, as well. You click the little mail icon up here, hit set up chat, and it welcomes you to Empathy. Empathy is new for them they used to use Pidgin. I still use Pidgin a little bit and I’ll go through how to install and set that up a little bit later in this but for right now just go no I want a new account or if you don’t have an account.

So this will be the enter the account details. Hit forward and all of these chat protocols are supported so you can keep adding them and adding them. Empathy is a multi‑format chat interface so it’s going to have your AIM contacts, your MSN contacts, your Facebook people. If you’re really big into most of your social networking you’ll get a lot of your contacts here at Empathy.

There’s also the integrated one with the operating system which if you click over here you can set it up where it’s the same setup here. It’s a little more integrated into the system instead of a separate program.

Speaking of Pidgin, we go to the software center and Pidgin is available on Windows also so if you like using it you can do it there too. If you remember yesterday with Audacity I canceled it because we were having some slow Internet troubles so we’ll actually get to see the software center and install a piece of software.

So once Pidgin has been downloaded it’ll be installed. Here’s Pidgin. You hit add and a format similar to the one that was up here before is now presented and you start your protocol. Set your user name and password, if you want it to remember it and what you want the local thing to be. It’s just another program the same thing as Empathy. It’s just been out a little longer, it’s a little more mature, it supports help and has a little more features.

Most of your other social networking sites are going to be supported through your web browser. You hit up Facebook and Twitter. Those are going to be the exact same as your Windows based ones except for the fact that you need to make sure with a heavy Flash based site that you have a working install Flash because the flash support on Linux can be a little sketchy sometimes. As far as social networking, there are other ones too if you don’t feel like using either of those.

Right now Pidgin and Empathy are installed. Kopete is one for KDE, there are a couple IRC clients in here; some people have probably never heard of IRC but before you had MSN, before you had AIM and all that stuff you had IRC. It’s been around for quite a while. ChatZilla. There’s a whole mess of chat programs from Linux.

That’s one of the good and bad things about open source software. When someone wants to make something they make something and if you need it and they made something that’s a good thing. On the other hand it also divides up effort that could go into creating a single piece of software that would be a lot more full featured but it might not do quite what someone wants. It’s a balancing act.

These are some of the social networking features that are here in Ubuntu 10.4 and a lot of them are cross platform and both other Linux installs and a lot of them run on Windows as well.

This has been Will from Be Your Own IT if you have any video requests or if you have any problems with your computer stop by our forums and you can drop a message in the “Diagnose my Computer” thread and we’ll get back to you. You can also come and just chat with the community if you want.

We also have a full line of products for teaching how to repair computers and starting your own business so if you’re interested in those you can come by our store.

I’ll see you in the next video.