Kopete, The KDE Instant Messenger

Kopete is an instant messenger supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise Messenger, and more. It is designed to be a flexible and extensible multi-protocol system suitable for personal and enterprise use. According to the Kopete FAQ, the name Kopete comes from the Chilean word Copete, a word to refer to alcoholic drinks

The goal of Kopete is to provide users with a single easy-to-use way to access all of their instant messaging systems. The interface puts people first, and is integrated with the system address book to let you access your contacts from other KDE applications. IM can be intrusive, but Kopete's notification system can be tuned so that only important contacts interrupt you.

Kopete also features tools to enhance your IM, such as message encryption, archiving, and many other fun and useful effects. Kopete supports all commonly used instant messaging protocols, and the Kopete team provides templates for developers to base new plugins on. Kopete's API provides developers with many features to make it easy to support a new protocol. All protocols are plugins and allow for modular installation, configuration, and usage.

Many Linux distributions now include a version of KDE in their own native package manager format (.rpm, .deb, etc.)

Using Yum to install kopete

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:

# yum install kdenetwork

or

# yum install kopete

Using Apt to install kopete

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:

# apt-get install kopete 
or 
# sudo apt-get install kopete

Using Urpmi to install kopete

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:

# urpmi kopete

Other Open Source Instant Messengers

• Pidgin