The latest BitlBee release is always available from https://www.bitlbee.org/. Download the package with your favorite program and unpack it: tar xvfz bitlbee-<version>.tar.gz where <version> is to be replaced by the version number of the BitlBee you downloaded (e.g. 0.91). BitlBee's build system has to be configured before compiling. The configure script will do this for you. Just run it, it'll set up with nice and hopefully well-working defaults. If you want to change some settings, just try ./configure --help and see what you can do. Some variables that might be of interest to the normal user: prefix, bindir, etcdir, mandir, datadir - The place where all the BitlBee program files will be put. There's usually no reason to specify them all separately, just specifying prefix (or keeping the default /usr/local/) should be okay. config - The place where BitlBee will save all the per-user settings and buddy information. /var/lib/bitlbee/ is the default value. jabber, oscar, twitter - By default, support for all these IM-protocols (OSCAR is the protocol used by both ICQ and AIM) will be compiled in. To make the binary a bit smaller, you can use these options to leave out support for protocols you're not planning to use. debug - Generate an unoptimized binary with debugging symbols, mainly useful if you want to do some debugging or help us to track down a problem. strip - By default, unnecessary parts of the generated binary will be stripped out to make it as small as possible. If you don't want this (because it might cause problems on some platforms), set this to 0. flood - To secure your BitlBee server against flooding attacks, you can use this option. It's not compiled in by default because it needs more testing first. ssl - BitlBee can use three different SSL libraries: GnuTLS, mozilla-nss and OpenSSL. (OpenSSL is, however, a bit troublesome because of licensing issues, so don't forget to read the information configure will give you when you try to use OpenSSL!) By default, configure will try to detect GnuTLS or mozilla-nss. If none of them can be found, it'll give up. If you want BitlBee to use OpenSSL, you have to explicitly specify that. After running configure, you should run make. After that, run make install as root. By default, BitlBee runs as the user nobody. You might want to run it as a separate user (some computers run named or apache as nobody). Since BitlBee uses inetd, you should add the following line to /etc/inetd.conf: 6667 stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/sbin/bitlbee bitlbee Inetd has to be restarted after changing the configuration. Either killall -HUP inetd or /etc/init.d/inetd restart should do the job on most systems. You might be one of the.. ehr, lucky people running an xinetd-powered distro. xinetd is quite different and they seem to be proud of that.. ;-) Anyway, if you want BitlBee to work with xinetd, just copy the bitlbee.xinetd file to your /etc/xinetd.d/ directory (and probably edit it to suit your needs). You should create a directory where BitlBee can store it's data files. This should be the directory named after the value 'CONFIG' in Makefile.settings. The default is /var/lib/bitlbee, which can be created with the command mkdir -p /var/lib/bitlbee. This directory has to be owned by the user that runs bitlbee. To make 'nobody' owner of this directory, run chown nobody /var/lib/bitlbee. Because things like passwords are saved in this directory, it's probably a good idea to make this directory owner-read-/writable only.