[Discuss] Yahoo Instant messaging with webcam etc. help/advice

[Murray Strome]

I am a complete novice when it comes to this area, never having used it 
except for some on-line chat for technical support (and that under 
Windows XP, not LINUX).

My sons' families got webcams for Christmas so we went out and bought 
one. With much fooling around, we all have managed to get Yahoo! 
Messenger up and running on XP machines, including PC to PC voice 
messaging and webcam viewing. This is great, but since the computers 
both my wife and I use are LINUX (Mandriva 2007) based, we wanted to try 
to set this up to work with LINUX.

I tried downloading and installing Yahoo! Messenger on one computer, 
though they say it has only been tested with Red Hat and SUSE.  The 
install seemed to go OK after downloading a lot of libraries that it 
seemed to need during the install.  It now seems to work, but strictly 
for instant messaging.  There were still files missing at first when I 
tried first tried to run it.  So, after reading a bit on the various 
forums, I decided to try GAIM.  I downloaded and installed it. That 
seemed to pick up the remaining files needed for Yahoo, so now both work 
(GAIM is a bit nicer) -- but again only for instant messaging.

My question is:  has anyone gotten the PC-PC calling feature to work 
with GAIM or Yahoo! messenger? What about the webcam feature?  I would 
hate to be stuck with M$ Windows as the only option for using these 
features.  I guess I can get by with it, since my laptop has XP installed.

Murray