INSTALLATION
============
If you installed BitlBee from a .deb or .rpm you probably don't have to do
anything anymore for installation. Just skip this section.
If you want to compile BitlBee yourself, that's fine. Just run ./configure
to set up the build system. If configure succeeds, run make to build BitlBee.
make install will move all the files to the right places.
--- (Fork)Daemon mode
These days ForkDaemon mode is the recommended way of running BitlBee. The
difference between Daemon and ForkDaemon mode is that in the latter, a
separate process is spawned for every user. This costs a little bit more
memory, but means that if one user hits a bug in the code, not all other
users get disconnected with him/her.
To use BitlBee in any daemon mode, just start it with the right flags or
enable it in bitlbee.conf (see the RunMode option). You probably want to
write an init script to start BitlBee automatically after a reboot. (This
is where you realise using a package from your distro would've been a better
idea. :-P)
Please do make sure that the user BitlBee runs as (not root, please!) is
able to read from and write to the /var/lib/bitlbee directory to save your
settings!
--- inetd installation (more or less deprecated)
After installation you have to set up inetd (you got that one running,
right? If not, just take a look at utils/bitlbeed.c) to start BitlBee. You
need to add BitlBee to inetd.conf, like this:
6667 stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/bitlbee
Creating a special BitlBee user and running BitlBee with that UID (instead
of just 'nobody') might be a good idea.
*BSD/Darwin/OSX NOTE: Most *BSD inetds are more scrict than the one that
comes with Linux systems. Possibly all non-Linux inetds are like this. They
don't allow you to specify a port number in the inetd.conf entry, instead
you have to put a service name there (one that is also mentioned in
/etc/services). So if there's no line in /services for 6667/tcp (or whatever
you choose), add it and use that name in the inetd.conf entry.
-- xinetd installation (equally deprecated)
Most machines use xinetd instead of inetd these days. If your machine runs
xinetd, you can copy the bitlbee.xinetd file from the doc/ directory to your
xinetd.d/ directory. Most likely you'll have to change a thing or two before
it'll work.
After configuring your (x)inetd, send the daemon a SIGHUP and things should
work. If not, see your syslogs, since both daemons will complain there when
something's wrong.
Also, don't forget to create the configuration directory (/var/lib/bitlbee/
by default) and chown it to the UID BitlBee is running as. Make sure this
directory is read-/writable by this user only.
DEPENDENCIES
============
BitlBee's only real dependency is GLib. This is available on virtually every
platform. Any recent version of GLib (2.4 or higher) will work.
These days, MSN Messenger clients have to connect to the MS Passport servers
through HTTPS. BitlBee can use several SSL libraries for this: GnuTLS, NSS
(which comes with Mozilla) and OpenSSL. OpenSSL is not GPL-compatible in some
situations, so using GnuTLS or NSS is preferred. However, especially on *BSD,
OpenSSL can be considered part of the operating system, which eliminates the
GPL incompatibility.
The incompatibility is also the reason why the SSL library detection code
doesn't attempt to use OpenSSL. If you want to use OpenSSL, you have to
force configure to use it using the --ssl=openssl parameter. For more
information about this problem, see the URL's configure will write to stdout
when you attempt to use OpenSSL.
PORTABILITY ISSUES
==================
Cygwin NOTE: You'll need a glib installation to run BitlBee. However, Cygwin
doesn't provide a glib package. You can download a binary tar.gz from:
. When you installed it, BitlBee should work
fine. You'll probably like bitlbeed or xinetd to get it running on the
network.
On some non-Linux systems the program still suffers from some random bugs.
Please do report them, we might be able to fix them if they're not too
mysterious.
Also, the configure script is known to not work very well with non-Bash
shells, so if you experience problems, make sure you use bash to run the
script. Same for