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 daemon (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
bootup, 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.

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

From version 3.2 bitlbee offers some form of skype support, even
though this will not ever be part of bitlbee proper. Please see
the documentation in protocols/skype in the source package for
information. You can run the script as following:

  SKYPE=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.