As many of you are already seeing that Yahoo and Pidgin aren’t working all that well together anymore, some folks are coming out with fixes left and right. Some say to edit the pager server while others say to edit the port number. Well, I’ve tried both of these and failed repeatedly.

This has to do with Yahoo upgrading their servers and as such, there has been a lot of connectivity issues between Pidgin and the Yahoo IM app. Some of you are doing just fine whereas many are not. It’s been a pot luck kind of deal connecting where you may miss and a friend will hit it right off. This is no way to use an IM client.

Pidgin themselves came up with a fix by having us upgrade to version 2.5.7 in which they have addressed this Yahoo server issue for us. No more editing pager server info or port numbers. Just download the new version or upgrade and go for it again an be happy.

Unfortunately, many of us that use a distro of Linux will be left to wait for our respective distros to update the connectivity issue laden bird. Or, we can always upgrade our installations ourselves.

Thing is, stop playing around with yours and go ahead and upgrade or install the latest version to get your Yahoo IM ID working again. Link here –> http://www.pidgin.im/download/

It’s been around 2 weeks since I upgraded my distro from 6 to 7 and so far I’m pleasantly impressed.It’s been a smooth sail ever since I installed it and with no issues during the installation to mention either.

I naturally backed up my /home directory and took snap-shots of all my apps and programs for later installation into LM7 and then inserted the disc for my copy of gparted to wipe the drive clean. I kept my partitions as they were since I couldn’t see any reason to change them and then ejected gparted.

So far everything has been running smoothly with the only minor issue I have is that sometimes, things seem to load slowly like Firefox for example. This could be attributed to some of the addons so I’m going to check those by eliminating them one by one to see if there’s a difference.

Other than that, I’m rocking right along enjoying my new desktop and what all it still does for me.

Anyone else out there tried Gloria yet? What do you think of this new version of Mint?

Update:

I got a comment from someone who made an accusation against Clem. Something to do with either politics or racism. Let’s get one thing straight here now….I don’t cater to politics nor accusations. Keep that stuff elsewhere. It has absolutely nothing to do with an operating system. Understood? Good!

This may seem trivial to most but you’d be surprised as to just how important an up to date contact point can be to you. Not just those spam adds are wanting to reach you, ya know!

Case in point here is from something I’ve been seeing a lot lately due to a lot of accounts getting moved from one server to another newer one. A Migration Notice gets sent out to all account holders on server ‘A’ to let them know in advance that their accounts are going to be migrated on a certain date. Obviously, this is a good thing to get moved to a newer, more up to date and powerful server so, you’d really want to know about this, right? I know I would!

A lot of what I’m seeing is that the ones who haven’t gotten their migration notices either didn’t update their contact information (read: email address on file) when they changed it or, they’re using an account specific one that when the DNS changes from the move from one server to the next (especially true of those with custom name servers and IP addresses) they lose the ability to be contacted as the email address no longer functions when the old server is shut down or decommissioned.

So, the importance of an up to date contact point is vital if you are running a business on-line and need to be kept in the loop with your web hosting provider. Also, making sure that they’re white-listed will help ensure that that all important email from them does actually reach your inbox instead of the Junk/Trash folder.

Just food for thought.

A while back I had written a post about the 5 reasons why I liked Evolution. I was challenged by some readers via comments and email about Thunderbird being a much better email client than Evolution in some respects.

Well, I thought about that and decided that it might be best to let that one slide because they both work very well but Evo has a few more features than Thunderbird but with the addition of some plugins, Thunderbird can be just as capable.

So, seeing as Evo was intended to be a sudo-substitute for M/S’s Outlook email program except for it being an open source project, it works just as well for my purposes. However, I did want to test out Thunderbird again just for old time’s sake to see if anything had changed since I last used it.

That’s when I found a cool web site devoted to the conversion of the vcard contact list to either LDIF, CSV, Gmail CSV, FritzBox CSV or Images. Now that’s nice seeing as Thunderbird doesn’t handle the vcard conversion itself. At least I couldn’t get it to do it.

I needed to add my contacts from Evolution to Thunderbird for my testing so all I had to do was to highlight all my contacts in Evo and then save them to my Desktop in vcard format. Next I went to http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/ and uploaded my file, selected the standard CSV format that Thunderbird wanted and clicked on convert. My file was instantly converted!

It’s that easy. Why fuss over this when this site makes it so easy? Give it a try next time you have to convert your vcard file to a CSV, it’s a breeze.

As for Thunderbird? I’m still testing it. Figure I’ll use it for a week and then decide.