Wine i believe one has to approach with a 'might work' attitude. why
not use Pidgin or Konversation - i haven't had any problems with
Pidgin or gaim as it used to be.

I use Kopete (KDE app), which is in the repository and supports Yahoo, MSN,
AIM and ICQ very well. Pigin is the Gnome equivalent and it also works well.
Either is worth a try and you don't need to mess with Wine.

My apologies that the IRC thingy. Kopete is the one... i got the two mixed up!

I just taken a look at the web based yahoo messenger for the first
time and it seems to run fine [i'm on FF3 and ubu 8.04]... Meebo is
the other fast web messenging app. Just thought you might like to give
them a try.

On FF2 and 7.10 [my upstairs pc] it
works fine... on FF3 and 8.04 it doesn't. Seems there are quite a few
problems with FF3.

That's putting it mildly.

I even fixed a few that I found (using FF3 source code) and tried to
recompile it and that, too, was a nightmare and I finally gave up. The
internal differences between FF2 and FF3 are almost unbelievable.

I'm back to FF2 2.0.0.18 on all my systems and will *NEVER* use FF3.

You've installed FF2 on 8.04 - i'd be grateful if you could advise.

I tried to install FF2 on 8.04 and one has to change the directory
somewhere. I didn't do it right... and ended putting back FF3. when
you have a spare moment i'd be v.grateful for a simple idiot proof
guide to follow!

It's really not that tricky but there was one minor gotcha in that
firefox was assuming the wrong libstdc++ and to fix that required
using Synaptic and select whatever other libstc++ wasn't installed;
I think it was version 5.

But here's the procedure.

First get the latest version of firefox, presently 2.0.0.18.

Visit this URL and grab the language version you want:

<www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html>

Visit here if you also want the latest version of Thunderbird,
noting the latest in the Ubuntu repositories is the obsolete 2.0.0.17
version:

<www.mozilla.com/.../all-older.html>

The following steps must be done as root; "sudo bash" will work.

If you don't already have one, create a /usr/local directory, then
create a /usr/local/mozilla directory.

Copy the thunderbird-2.0.0.18.tar.gz file to /usr/local/mozilla

Unpack the tar file per:

cd /usr/local/mozilla
zcat thunderbird-2.0.0.18.tar.gz | tar xvof -

That's it for steps needing to be performed as root.

A "/usr/local/mozilla/firefox" must be added to your PATH. Best to
do it in the bash setup, but for a quick test this works:

export PATH=/usr/local/mozilla/firefox:$PATH

Now simply start firefox from the command line:

firefox &

If you receive an error about a missing libstdc++, then you'll have
to use Synaptic, search for "libstdc", and install whatever version
you don't already have. That's it.

Plugins may or may not have to be manually installed; I really don't
use any, but installation instructions "should" accompany plugins.

The only other matter is the firefox icon for the desktop.

Create a launcher for /usr/local/mozilla/firefox/firefox
Click the default icon in the upper left portion of the launcher
creation window to browse, select "Filesystem", then navigate to
/usr/local/mozilla/firefox/icons and click "Open". The one that
works is mozicon128.png

It's nice not having to suffer FF3's bugs!

Minor problem of my part when reading email while typing especially
when the two products' version numbers are identical. :-)

Two steps above need to be changed by replacing "thunderbird" with
"firefox" per:

: Copy the firefox-2.0.0.18.tar.gz file to /usr/local/mozilla
:
: Unpack the tar file per:
:
: cd /usr/local/mozilla
: zcat firefox-2.0.0.18.tar.gz | tar xvof -

Many thanks i'll give it a go - i've only been using ubuntu for now
just over a year so i've only done one or two tar installs. Can one
not use the FF2 in 8.04 repo?

If it's there (AND) if it's version 2.0.0.18, that might be the
easiest way to go. But installing from the tar.gz is really simple
and you know where the package and all its components are located,
so it's easy to install plugins manually.

I just took a quick look at my /usr/local/mozilla and I have only
two plugins installed, the latest Java runtime and flash, and
those were manual installs.

For some inexplicable reason, I've never been able to get auto
installs of addins/plugins to work on any of my Linux or UNIX
boxes, and it offers to download the plugins and then I have to
manually install them (which is a one-time only thingie -- it's
either s symbolic link to the *.so or a *.so itself).

Auto plugin install works fine on Windows, though.

Have you installed any plugins and, if so, were they all a point
and click install from within Firefox?

Note that whichever route to install firefox 2 you choose, make
sure it's 2.0.0.18 and not 2.0.0.17 (some security issues).

In my case the following went smoothly:
sudo aptitude install thunderbird

It is in the repositories.