OpenBSD NC4200: mcabber, console jabber client connect to Google Talk thru proxy.

mcabber is yet another console jabber client. There's a few more console messaging program but I'll get my hands dirty on this one first. I downloaded and installed the mcabber-0.10.0.tgz package.

I edited ~/.mcabber/mcabberrc. This is what I changed:

set jid = me@gmail.com
set server = talk.google.com
set port = 443
set ssl = 1
set proxy_host = "proxy.com"
set proxy_port = 8080

I left all the other options untouched. Then I run mcabber by issuing, uhm, mcabber in xterm. Then mcabber asked for my gmail password and voila!, I'm connected to GTalk. I can see my Google Talk friends listed but haven't had the chance to try and chat with any of them. Anyway I kept getting "feature not implemented" notification but unless I do some chatting, I don't quite sure what's the missing "feature". Maybe I'll update this part later.

Just a note, using the same setting, I can now login to GTalk using pidgin messenger. As pidgin is too much for wmii, I rather stick with mcabber. If you have other (preferably better) console jabber messenger program which can use proxy, do tell me. I'm interested to try out others.

OpenBSD NC4200: Alpine + DavMail, ftp_proxy / http_proxy problem again.

Here's the latest update for my Alpine + DavMail project. Installing Alpine via OpenBSD's package doesn't come with LDAP support enabled. I can verify that by using:

$ alpine -supported

So, I read the OpenBSD ports system man pages and Alpine ports man pages and found that I need to specify the ldap flavor when building the Alpine ports. So in /usr/ports/mail/alpine directory, I use this syntax to build Alpine port with ldap built-in.

$ sudo env FLAVOR="ldap" make install
$ sudo env FLAVOR="ldap" make clean

That's when I found out that my ftp_proxy / http_proxy is unusable. Again. Sheesh! I don't know what happened to it and I'm still searching for solution. So, I downloaded the needed dependencies manually and put it inside /usr/ports/distfiles/. After a while the Alpine with ldap support is installed. Oh I need to remove the previous Alpine installation before the new Alpine can be installed. Alpine-ldap is installed and so do DavMail. Now for the good stuff. Making them work (nicely) together. For that, I'll write it in another post.

Coming up next: My DavMail configurations