Bitlbee

After ages trying to find an Instant Messenger that works for me, I think I've finally done it. A recap:

• MSN Messenger 7.0 - No. Just no.
• Gaim - I'm not entirely sure what it is, but all my GTK programs work perfectly fine except The Gimp and Gaim. They keep giving me DLL Hell. In the end, Gaim stopped working completely and I gave up.
• Trillian - Never tried this. It seems to be like Gaim but not open source, no Jabber support, and an interface that wishes it was MSN Messenger.
• Psi - Something I used for a while. Basically just a Jabber client, I used it with a transport to connect to MSN. I eventually got put off by lack of decent logging, unreliable Jabber servers, and non-standard interface elements. I'll still watch the project to see if it improves.

And now I'm using... erm, ChatZilla. With a Bitlbee server running, I can use any IRC client to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, or ICQ (not that I actually use the last 3). All my contacts appear as IRC users in a channel, and I can talk to them with /msg. Excellent.

Tags: chatzilla free_software jabber / Posted on 24 May 2005 at 21:51