irc and bitlebee

Lots of stuff at Openminds goes via irc, it started with our company channel for internal communication. After a while I found the joy of irc by joining community channels like #rails, #spree, #git, where, most of the time, you can find an answer really quickly. But it was time to do more with it.

Since I’m mostly using Skype, I don’t really run Adium anymore to connect with MSN, Google Talk or even Facbook chat, that just uses Jabber. ~

Quick start

For a quick start, visit http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/servers.html and connect to the server closest near you. After you got connected start by registering. Do use a good password for this step!

• register *<password>*

Adding accounts

Then you can start adding some accounts. The syntax for this step is like this:

• account add jabber handle password servertag

In my case I wanted to ad my MSN, Google Talk and Facebook account. (you will need a Facebook username)

• account add msn handle password
• account add jabber <username>@chat.facebook.com> <Facebook password>
• account add jabber username@gmail.com mypasswd

you can find more information for more account types here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee#line-57

Start chatting

After you created all your accounts, you can see them by typing account list and with account on you can activate all accounts.

With the command blist on you can see al you online account. When you use facebook chat you will see that all you buddies called somthing like u12345678456, which is pretty hard to remember :) But no worries, there is a script which allows you to rename all those buddies. Be sure to sign off and on after you loaded the script with ‘account off’ and ‘account on’

So you wanne start a conversation? Type /msg username message to start one in en new window or just user: message for just a single IM.

For more stuff just use our good friend google.

There is a nice quickstart document with some basic commands to see your accounts, your buddies and much more. Download the pdf