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 your installation you will need to configure bitlbee. There are two ways starting bitlbee: Either as a forked deamon (preferred), or the old way of starting it through inetd (mostly deprecated these days). Bitlbee now includes a standard rc.bitlbee. To have this start on boot-up, add the following code to /etc/rc.d/rc.local for example if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.bitlbee ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.bitlbee start fi If you choose to use inetd , you need to modify your /etc/inetd.conf so bitlbee will 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. if you want to use libevent for events, instead of the default glib, install libevent and run the script like this: EVENTS=libevent ./bitlbee.SlackBuild OTR (Off the record) is not compiled by default. If you want bitlbee to compile with OTR capabilities, you'll need to install libotr from Slackware and run the script as follows: OTR=yes ./bitlbee.SlackBuild 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) NOTE: Since bitlbee now runs as a daemon instead of from inetd, bitlbee runs under its own user (UID/GID: 250). If you have older databases of bitlbee, you may want to change the permissions on the files in /var/lib/bitlbee.