Imagine that you are back in the past when the internet was just text and the only way to communicate with other people was IRC.

Well, it’s possible to connect to almost everything with bitlbee. I’m sure most of you already know probably about this, but I didn’t know until yesterday and that’s why I’m blogging about it.

Installation

As simple as:

yum -y install bitlbee


Configuration

Edit the file /etc/xinetd.d/bitlbee and change “disabled = yes” with “disabled = no”

Start xinetd

service xinetd start; chkconfig xinetd on


First steps

Set up your favorite IRC client to connect to localhost:6667 , as bitlbee works a local IRC server in your computer,  you could easily try to connect to it with /server localhost, the persistent configuration to autoconnect will depend in your IRC client, I use a client-based old client, irssi. Once connected it will join you to a channel called &bitlbee

Once on that channel you will have to start setuping your IM accounts, but first you may need to register to bitlbee as it  will store your credentials (I’m sorry, is the only way it works, but no worries it remains somewhere in your pc).

To register say in the &bitlbee channel:

register PASSWORD

pick a password strong enough.

The next time you join this channel you will have to use:

identify PASSWORD

Now is time to start adding accounts:

Facebook

account add jabber youruser@chat.facebook.com yourpassword

Now you would need to set another thing to help bitlbee to bring the facebook nicknames in a friendly way.

account fb set nick_source full_name (BitlBee 3.0+)
account set facebook/nick_source full_name (Older versions)

Gtalk

This is easy:

account jabber youruser@gmail.com yourpassword

The syntaxis is always the same “account [protocol] [user] [password]”

Twitter

Yes!, twitting from the IRC is really nice, the command would be:

account add twitter user password

it will first start a new query, giving you an URL, you have to click on that URL and it will give you a passcode, then you can put that passcode on that query and that’s all, it will create a new IRC channel called #twiiter_youraccount and you can see twitter as it was a normal IRC channel:

Almost done

After setting up everything you are ready to start, just run:

account on

Have fun!