BitlBee is an IRC instant messaging gateway licensed under the terms of the GPL. It communicates with the end user via the IRC protocol whilst interacting with popular chat networks such as AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber. The user's buddies appear as normal IRC users in a channel, and conversations use the private message facility of IRC. After the installation, you need to modify your /etc/inetd.conf so bitlbee wil be started when /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd is called on bootup. Add the line below to your /etc/inetd.conf file: 6667 stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/bitlbee Restart inetd (/etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart). All that is left to do now is connect your irc client to the localhost. NOTE: The default "bot"/bitlbee daemon is called 'root'. This is not the root user on your system. You can easily change it. Register and identify yourself first, and then: rename root BitlBot (or whatever you want)