Arjun,
Why did you feel the need to criticize him for posting a question? Clearly four or five people felt his question was valid enough to answer it. I think most people know about the search feature. If you see a post and feel it has already been answered, then just simply don't answer it. I hardly see how your post was justified or helpful in any way. I have been a part of a lot of tech forums and inevitably someone will put forth a post just like yours and stifle new people from asking questions; making them feel like they have to do an exhaustive search before they can post something that is on their mind. Let's not do that. Just my $.02.

There is no criticizing involved. Not one word was specifically in a critical tone. Everything said was generalization.

I do not know anyone at this site to get personal. If some one tells me that they searched this Forum and could not find anything about ' Gaim ' then I have to be surely surprised. This would tell me that this Forum is not being utilized and or maintained properly. People do know about ' Search ' feature, only some do not use it.

Time and time again it has been mentioned in this Forum that people do not think it necessary to ' Search ' for information. Time and time again, the exact steps to install Gaim ( Aim, MSN, Irc, Sametime and whatnot ) has been mentioned by so many people. Time and time again yet, how good bad or ugly ' Gaim ' is, has been mentioned in this Forum. This has been done for both the ITs. We all have done our part in searching and trying to figure things out. I do not see anything wrong in searching for and gleaning information.

I will have to agree with koolguynet on this one. If you generalize, people will be hurt. Even newbies don't want to be reminded that they are newbies too much - it makes people feel worth less and that's just plain stupid.

We are all newbies in a certain field at one time, and the thing that makes us better is people helping. If you get too much criticism in one field you just choose to go to another one - which I am sure we do not want to happen here.

I am not a frequent poster in here, but I have been following this forum from almost the time of it's start, and I generally think we have a fairly friendly and very helpful, if somewhat developer-oriented, forum. Being mostly a developer myself, this hits the sweet spot for me :-)

I generally suggest the search simply because it can take hours if not days to get an answer sometimes. Many to most questions are already covered in the search. I do agree that sometimes people are simply to lazy to look through the pages to find their answers though.

Instead of running gaim, if you want to use the builtin jabber client, you can join a jabber server that supports the aim procotol. I use http://jabber.belnet.be/

sign up for it in a jabber client like psi, then you can browse to the aim connector and click on it. You'll be able to im people from aim using the name AIMACCOUNT@aim.jabber.belnet.be. I'm sorry I can't give better directions, but I don't have time at the momente.

GAIM runs perfectly for me on 770 and N800 for the most part. My only problem has been not getting the meanwhile (sametime) client to work-- AIM, MSN, Yahoo and irc all work well.

And I truly saw no problem with Arjun's posts. He's right: an easy, proper search does turn up many IM threads that answer your original question. IMO some people are being far too sensitive in this forum, looking for insults and slights that aren't really there.

I have $.02 to contribute too: let's quit assuming the worst about a poster's intent (in this case, Arjun). Some might be amazed how far that small effort goes toward constructive discourse all around.