I just installed licq-1.3.0-1.fc2.i386.rpm on Fedora Core 3 and started the program.
I got the window "Licq" with the meny System, and a popup saying "From the Owner Manager Dialog you are able to add and register your accounts. Currently only one owner per protocol is supported, but this will be changed in future versions." (At this point, I have no idea what an "owner" is. I have not yet seen enough of this program to be able to guess very much, but I felt "owner" would somehow turn out to be me. So, only one me is supported. Sure, I don't have split personalities yet. Could it be... No, you are problably not so clumsy. Or... perhaps I should say it anyway: Is "owners" another word for "accounts"? Oh, excuse me for thinking such a stupid thing. I did not know there were plans to add other protocols. Or do you refer to protocol versions?. What do you think users who don't know what a protocol is will make out of this message? What a cozy welcome to give a new user of your program!) When I OK'ed the "Liqc Information" pop-up, the Owner Manager Dialog appeared. I clicked the Add button because the popup had said "Add and Register", and because I notices a thicker black border around this button, suggesting this was the default button somehow. An "Edit owner" box came up, but I did not know what to put in the "User ID" field. I have barely used ICQ at all, and I found Gaim was sufficiently frustrating that I had looked around for something else to try, and I had found licq. Now I knew that ICQ has "ICQ numbers" that could be seen as kind of "User ID"s, which Gaim had chose to call "Screen name". That had sounded a lot like an alias to me, but then there had been a field below labeled "Alias", so I had not been sure. Now I do have an ICQ number, but I had decided to create a new account, and not mess up the one I had been using Gaim with, until I felt more confident. I left the "User ID" field open and typed a password (just once, for once, I thought a little bewildered), and clicked OK. Nothing happened. "That's right, it says 'Edit Owner', I should probably try the other button first", I thought. I canceled the dialog and clicked "Register" instead. "Licq User Registration" was the title of the next dialog. "UIN Registration" the dialog said at the top. At fisrt I did not notice, I must admit, but I am repeating the steps while writing this to make sure I get it right. Perhaps I should have noticed, and learned another concept, "UIN". Whatever that is, it seems to be something registerable. What could that be? "User ICQ Number".. sounds silly. "User ID Number".. Sounds better. Who knows? Ah, a wizard!, How nice! "You can register a new user here." I thought I would register an account, or so had the initial popup said, but I somehow feel that could be related. It resembles the Unix and Windows notion of a User Account. I pressed Next. Now I had to enter a password, and repeat. Without that repetition, I wonder how many users would have felt put off, not knowing what password to type, or what that password was going to be used for. I think the dialog should have been labeled "Enter a password to be used to protect the new account." That is spelling things out in full. If the user has gone astray and misunderstood something at some earlier point, she has a chance to get back on track with a proper labeling of this dialog. What is the "Save password" checkbox for? Does it make sense _not_ to save it? Or, perhaps it means that I will not be required to enter it each time? Oh, yes. Then I remembered that I had already found out that my account would not be just a local affair on my PC, it would be sent to a server somewhere, and it makes sense to save it locally so you don't have to remember it. What will this look like to a user with less experience in computing than me? I know most users simply don't bother what things are, but when there is consistently too little information to go on, and you mor or less have to infer what things are by eliminating possibilities, then this checkbox could easily confuse and make the user feel unsure if she has guessed correctly so far. I clicked Next, and got to step three, which did not consist in any thing but to go on to the next step. It si good that the wizard does not take too long steps at a time, so the user has a chance to not fall off. So I clicked "Finish" to do the opposite of finish, to begin, but to begin what I thought I had begun a long time ago, having already reached step three. Never mind. I don't require to understand _everything_. Of course, if you already know everything, then it is perfectly logical, "the registration process" is likely to be a process involving the remote server someplace, a server already alluded to above. If you don't already know, on the other hand, such insider language is quite unintelligible. "User registration in progress..." Nice, an new window title, and a nice confirmation that I was guessing correctly. But this time something went wrong. When I returned to the window manager "workspace" with the licq windows and dialogs after adding a few lines to this mail, I found: Licq Error (in the title bar) and: "20:18:38 [ERR] Unable to sign on: NewServer: (null), cookie: (null)". Clicking OK, there was another information dialog below: Licq Information, "Registration failed. See network window for details." Clicking OK, I began wondering: Network window? What window? The Owner Manager was still up, but empty. The "Licq" window was there as before, having a "System" menu, an empty table with headers S and Alias, and some fields below saying All Users twice. Ok, looking carefully in the menu, I found it: Network Window. I clicked and it said: 19:30:33: [INI] Qt GUI configuration. 19:30:33: [INI] Geometry configuration (17, 180) (280 x 441) 19:30:33: [INI] Applying basic skin. 20:18:32: [SRV] Resolving login.icq.com port 5190... 20:18:33: [SRV] ICQ server found at 64.12.200.89:5190. 20:18:33: [SRV] Opening socket to server. 20:18:33: [SRV] Registering a new user... 20:18:38: [WRN] Registration error. 20:18:38: [ERR] Unable to sign on: NewServer: (null), cookie: (null). What should I think? Could it be that the server would not allow multiple registrations from the same IP address in a short time? Could it be that I had used the same password? Unlikely. Could it be that the server was simply too loaded? I decided to start over. (The third time, since I was repeating my steps to make sure I was getting details right. In the first attempt, I had not gotten this message. Instead I had gotten a number, an ID, it looked like an ICQ number, ands I still believe it was. But then I had not been able to proceed in any way. I had gotten a dialog with many tabs, and I had written a few data, like my real name. But then I could not Save. When I pressed "Save", nothing happened, as if I still had to supply some required bit, but I had no idea what that bit was. I had supplied a mail address, using a yahoo account to avoid any potential conflict with my first (Gaim-created) id. Clicking Send, I got a dialog saying I needed to be online or that I could not do that while offline, I don't remember. Then I had tried to right-click the small computer icon in the lowermost field in the "Licq" window - that computer had appeared sometime after the apparently successfull registration - and select Online. The field said "offline" next to that computre icon. Nothing had happened. The field continued to read offline. I had tried the shortcut on the menu, Alt O. No change. I had found the corresponding entry on the System menu, no change. That was the reason I had began writing this mail. I had started the process with "licq -b .licq-seconduser", a non- existing directory. When I could not go forward in any way I had closed the program and reopened it. The I had seen that the program came up like the first time, requesting me to add a user/owner/account. There was nothing in the Owner Manager window.) Now I have removed the .licq-seconduser directory, and started over with licq -b .licq-seconduser (in my home directory). Exactly the same error. ... 20:44:09: [SRV] ICQ server found at 64.12.200.89:5190. 20:44:09: [SRV] Opening socket to server. 20:44:10: [SRV] Registering a new user... 20:44:15: [WRN] Registration error. 20:44:15: [ERR] Unable to sign on: NewServer: (null), cookie: (null). Now I am unable to reproduce the original frustration. I only get the error above. -Enrique ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. 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