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BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It's a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don't want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.

BitlBee currently supports the following IM networks/protocols: XMPP/Jabber (including Google Talk), MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and ICQ.

Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get the program working.

As soon as you get your accounts working, you can add users to your contact list and talk to them, just like you normally do on IRC. Open a query, talk to the person in the channel, or even talk to them in groupchats that will look to you like just another IRC channel.

If you don't want to (or can't) install BitlBee on your own machine you can also use one of the public servers. If you use Windows, this is the preferred option, as the Win32 port isn't very reliable yet.

Some people maintain BitlBee packages for other systems. They're not maintained by us, so they might be out of date. Here are links to the ones we know:

* Many Linux distributions (including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE) have BitlBee packages already. Just use apt-get, yum, yast, pacman, emerge or whatever it is on your distro of choice.
* BackPorts.Org has backports of BitlBee for older Debian releases.
* Fedora/RedHat packages on Dag Wieers' apt-rpm repository.
* Ports should be available for OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD now. They're all in the official ports trees, so I don't host them here.

For the brave and curious

We have a bzr repository which holds the current development tree (plus some other branches). There are nightly binary builds for various Debian/Ubuntu versions too.