Getting Ymessenger's RPM to play nice in Slackware

ck3k-ck3k@ck3k.org 2/24/04

As you may all know gaim is currently having issues with yahoo for whatever reason, so I wanted to use thier "offical client" for unix, sadly it is only avalible as a rpm or dep. The following is a small little howto just in case anyone wants to do the same.

download the RedHat9 rpm from http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/download/unix.html

use the converter which should be installed on your system called rpm2tgz

"rpm2tgz rh9-ymessenger.rpm"

now you have your tgz file

"installpkg rh9-ymessenger.tgz"

now you should be able to run the config from the shell by typing

"ymessenger"

this setup is kinda fucked up
**make sure you do not select the xinitrc option, this will overwrite your current .xinitrc with a blank file thus causing your X not to start.
I also do not suggest having any of the icons put onto your system, but that is just me.

After finishing your install

"cd /home/yourusr/"

"ls -a"

now you will see some hidden files

"cd .ymessenger" ...yes that is a period

in this folder you should find a file called preferences kill this file

"rm preferences"

this solved the "seg fault" errors you get when trying to start ymessenger

now you should have your ymessenger bin/lib in /opt so

"cd /opt/ymessenger/bin"

"sh ymessenger"

yahoo should now start up with no worries, this is alot to go thru for a stupid chat program, but when your trying to convert from windows to all linux, you want to have all your older programs working.