Msnclient

Welcome to the msnclient project home page. The project's goal is to create a console client for MSN Messenger for Unix.

News

2003.05.12: Great news. I have already uploaded the first alpha, release. This release is very cryptic, but it can send 1-word messages as long as the msnclient user initiates the conversation. Well, that's about it.

2003.01.08: After some months of absence, I finally got back to work on the project. The reason: the university. I'm now back to the project and I just managed to fix most synchronization (mutex) problems and it now retrieves the contact list and displays it on the right. It still doesn't send any messages yet, but I'm currently working on that. Note: I will update the CVS tree until I manage to get this working. In the meanwhile, please hold on a little more. :-)

Why?

Because my video card is a SiS 530 and running X Window with it is like hell (slow, sloow, slooow). Most of my contacts live in the Microsoft world, so they blindly use MSN Messenger. I need not to loose contact with them while I run Linux and I haven't found any client that runs without the need of a GUI.

Goals (at the moment)

• The client should be multithreaded and asynchronous.
• The code must be very well modularized, so you are able to remove my UI and insert your own, or to replace the current implementation of the protocol, or whatever.
• The UI must be IRC-like.
• The UI must allow the client to run on any Linux console.
• It should be portable, although the program will initially only run on Linux.

What is needed now?

• A nice CSS skin for this shit. :-)

Current status

The program is still in its very early stages. It barely accepts 6 commands: /connect username@hotmail.com, /online, /offline, /away, /msg {user-id|conversation-id} 1-word-message and /quit. Try pressing "=" after logging in.

Is it free?

The program is released under the GNU General Public License. This (basically) means that about costs, it will cost you nothing. Anyway, be sure to read the license included. I put it in ./doc/LICENSE.

Where can I download it?

Check the Files Release section at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65694

PLEASE NOTE: CVS VERSION IS OUTDATED

You can get the source code by accessing the CVS tree. For this, you must log in to the CVS server and then download the source code. The following commands will do that for you from a Linux PC with cvs installed:

cvs     -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.msnclient.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/msnclient login
cvs -z8 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.msnclient.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/msnclient checkout msnclient

If you need to use Windows (what for? :-/) to access the CVS tree, try using WinCVS. I downloaded the 1.2 binary distribution, installed it and copied cvs.exe from C:\Program Files\GNU\WinCvs 1.2 to some other directory accessible from my %PATH%. Then, I issued the second of the above commands and it worked.

The author

My name is Octavio Alvarez Piza. You can reach me at alvarezp@octavio.ods.org