In my search for a Linux IM client that will support webcams, I stumbled across Ayttm, or Are You Talking To Me? Like GAIM and other IM clients, it supports a full range of chat protocols — AOL, MSN, Y!, etc., not to mention smiley themes, importable contact lists, and so forth. However, it does have a few extras.

First and foremost is the webcam support. I was able to view a friend’s Yahoo! webcam feed with no problems, and the picture was great. Unfortunately allowing him to view my cam didn’t work out of the box. While I could invite him to view my web cam, he only got a blank screen. I did find the video capture setting in the preferences, but there’s NO documentation to tell me what to do with it. It’s going to be one for their mailing list, and if I get it resolved, I’ll be sure to post a follow-up. (MSN/NetMeeting is supported through GnomeMeeting, though the site does claim there are issues. I’m not set up to test it.)

However, that didn’t kill the deal for me as there are some other cool features, such as translation. If you’ve got a friend that only speaks French/Italian/Spanish/whatever, Ayttm will perform translation through Babelfish for you; you type in Engilsh, but your chat partner receives messages and responds in their native language, and in turn, you receive English back. Talk about a smart feature. And if you want to brush up on your L33t-speak, it will even convert incoming messages to L33t for you.

Another interesting feature is email. Rather than diving into your email client to fire off a quick message, Ayttm can be configured to use a local or remote SMTP server to send email to any of your contacts. Not a killer app, certainly, but an interesting thought.

Need security? There’s SSL support for Jabber, and GPG support for Kopete.

Overall, I’m fairly happy with it. It’s a sharp little app with a nice, clean interface and it looks like it will become my client of choice. Downloads are available at the website in tar and RPM format. I installed from the Fedora Core 2 RPM and was up and running in seconds.