Peter Nuttall Tom Albers The default way to send instant messages in &kde; is to use the IM client, &kopete;. This is a multi-protocol IM client, meaning that it handles several different protocols including MSN, Jabber, AOL and IRC. It also has useful features including support for &kaddressbook;, meta-contacts, encryption support and lots more. &kopete;, the &kde; IM client. &kopete;, the &kde; IM client. &kopete;, the &kde; IM client. Start up &kopete; from the menu (it can normally be found in the Internet folder) When it starts up you should see a window with &kopete; at the top, menus and a tool bar below, and then your contacts below. You should add some accounts by clicking on the Settings menu and selecting the Configure Kopete option. By selecting the Accounts option you should see a list of your accounts (initially empty) and options to add new accounts and to edit or remove existing accounts. By clicking on the add new account button, you can add a new account using the wizard. When you have added an account, you can connect to this account by clicking on the relevant icon at the bottom of your main &kopete; window. This should make your contacts appear in the contacts window. Meta contacts are one of the features of &kopete; that make sense once you figure out what they are. Until you do, they annoy you. They are basically a way of taking a contact on one network (such as MSN) and linking it to another contact on a different network. This is useful for when people have accounts on different networks as you can chat to them without needing to know which account they are signed on to. This also lets you assign names to your meta-contacts that don't change when people change their names on their account, this is useful if you have contacts who insist upon setting their MSN nick to something like =EF=81=8A. You can do other useful things with meta-contacts like link them to entries in your address book. See Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been around far longer than most IM systems, and is still widely used. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication. The #kde channel is under Freenode, the IRC server, which provides an interactive environment for coordination and support of peer-directed projects, including -- and placing particular stress upon -- those relating to free software and open source projects, such as &kde;. While &kopete; has a IRC plugin, and handles both channels and nicks well, long time IRC users might prefer a client designed just for that role, which is what Konversation is. It supports features such as granting and taking op status, banning, easy nick changing, special channel support for passwords and invites, and other things that the power IRC users expect. It also is far better at handling large channels such as #debian. If you have used another power-IRC client before, you should have no trouble using Konversation. Did it happen to you? You received an email and the first thing you would like to do is to give a reaction on it, but not by email. So you switch to your instant messaging client and/or IRC client and look if that person is online via MSN, Jabber or IRC. Well &kde; 3.3 has made that a lot easier. A step-by-step manual: The requirements are &kmail;, &kaddressbook; and &kopete; (Konversation should do as well). Make sure &kmail; is configured and fully functional for email, and Kopete is well configured for IRC, Jabber and/or MSN and/or any other protocol. If an email comes in from a contact you know, the first thing you have to do is to add it to your address book. This can be achieved by right clicking the address and choosing the entry Add to Address Book. If you know the nickname which the user uses on, for example, IRC, go to &kopete;. Go to FileAdd contact . In the wizard, select the checkbox at the bottom called Use the KDE address book for this contact and choose Next. Select the right Address Book entry for that contact and press Next. Now you can set the display name and the group it belongs to for &kopete;. In the next screen select which protocol should be used if you have set up more then one protocol. You can select more than one protocol. After that, depending on the protocol, there will be some other questions, which you can answer as you like. Although we did specify to choose from the address book, &kopete; has not automatically linked your contact to the address book. So select the contact and choose EditProperties . On the General tab check the box labeled Has address book entry. Press ... and select the contact. Close these two windows. Now go to your addressbook, if you select the contact you will see that it shows an extra field Presence, followed by the current status. This status will automatically update as soon as the contact goes away, offline, online, and so on. Now go to &kmail;, select another email and return to the original email (in other words: reload the current email). You can now see behind the email address the current state of your contact. If you want to chat with this person, just right click the address in &kmail; and choose Chat With.... Your Instant Messenger will start a conversation with the contact.