RSS Readers
RSS is one of the protocols of Web 2.0, the next generation of Internet content. Although RSS has been in use for a couple of years now, it has only recently started to really take off, thanks to adoption across a large number of websites and portals.
The key advantage of RSS is that you can quickly read news from your specific choice of websites at a time that suits you. Some services offer just the articles' headlines, whereas others offer full articles for you to view. RSS feeds can be accessed in various ways, even through your web browser!
Firefox
Firefox implements RSS feeds as what it calls Live Bookmarks (shown in Figure 5.10), which are essentially bookmarks with subbookmarks, each linking to a new page from your chosen website. I like to have several news sites grouped together under a folder on my toolbar called News, allowing me to quickly browse through my collection of sites and pick out articles that really interest me.
FIGURE 5.10 Live Bookmarks for Firefox, making all your news fixes just a mouse click away.
Liferea
Of course, not everyone wants to read RSS feeds with the browser. The main problem with reading RSS feeds with Firefox is that you get to see only the headline rather than any actual text. This is where a dedicated RSS reader comes in handy, and Liferea (see Figure 5.11) is one of the best.
FIGURE 5.11 Read your daily news feeds with Liferea, a fantastic and easy-to-use RSS feed reader.
It is not installed by default, so you have to retrieve it by going to Applications, Add/Remove Software. After it is installed, you can find it under the Applications, Internet menu labeled simply Liferea.
By default, Liferea offers a number of RSS feeds, including Fedora People, Red Hat Magazine, and Fedoranews.org. Adding a new feed is straightforward. All you need to do is select New Subscription under the Feeds menu and paste the URL of the RSS feed into the box. Liferea then retrieves all the current items available through that field, and displays the feed name on the left side for you to select and start reading.
Instant Messaging with Pidgin
Instant messaging is one of the biggest ways for people to interact on the web. AOL was the primary force behind this, especially in America, but other networks and systems soon came onto the market providing users with a wealth of choice.
No longer just a consumer tool, instant messaging is now a part of the corporate world, with many different companies deploying internal instant messaging software for collaboration.
One of the biggest hurdles that Fedora had to overcome was the fact that with the exception of Jabber, there was no client software to access networks such as AIM or MSN. Fortunately, where there is a will there is a way, and Pidgin was created as a multiprotocol instant messaging client enabling you to connect to several different networks that use differing protocols.
If you have used earlier versions of Fedora, you might be wondering why we are covering Pidgin rather than GAIM. Well, GAIM had a few legal problems surrounding their use of AIM within their name, which could have led to confusion with AOL Instant Messenger. As a result, GAIM rebranded itself Pidgin instead and is included within Fedora.
You can find Pidgin under Applications, Internet, listed as Internet Messenger, and it is shown in Figure 5.12.
FIGURE 5.12 Pidgin, the new name for GAIM, allows you to send instant messages to pretty much any IM network.
When you launch Pidgin for the first time, you are prompted to create an account. Just select an option from the protocol list, enter your screen name and password for that protocol/service (as shown in Figure 5.13), and click the Save button. Pidgin automatically tries to log in to that network using the credentials you have supplied. If successful, and if you have previously assigned contacts to your IM service, you should see them pop up in the Buddy List window.
FIGURE 5.13 Pidgin offers a neat solution to keeping in touch with people, regardless of the IM network they use.
Pidgin supports Jabber, an open XML-based IM protocol that can be used to set up a corporate IM server. Jabber is not supplied with Fedora, but you can obtain additional information about it from the Jabber home page at http://www.jabber.com/. You can obtain the Jabber server, Jabberd, from http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/. If you want to use Pidgin locally for collaboration, Jabber would be an excellent choice for a private local server.
Internet Relay Chat
As documented in RFC 2812 and RFC 2813, the
Fedora provides a number of graphical IRC clients, including X-Chat, licq, and Chatzilla, but there is no default chat client for Fedora. Fedora also provides the console clients epic and licq for those who eschew X. If you don't already have a favorite, you should try them all.
You should never use an IRC client while you are the root user. It is better to create a special user just for IRC because of potential security problems. To use X-Chat in this manner, you open a terminal window, use su to change to your IRC user, and start the X-Chat client.
X-Chat is a popular IRC client, and it is the client that is used in this chapter's example. The HTML documents for X-Chat are available in /usr/share/docs/xchat. It is a good idea to read them before you begin because they include an introduction to and cover some of the basics of IRC. You need to download and
