Kopete/Jabber Transport

Warning

Some of this information is very old and may be obsolete. If you have any recent knowledge of Jabber Transports, please either edit this page or write notes on the attached discussion page.
It is known that GoogleTalk works with Jabber and needs no special steps to set it up.

How to use Transport with the Kopete Jabber plugin

Why this document ?

On May 18th, 2005, an upgrade on the Microsoft server broke Kopete's MSN support. Even though a patch was quickly available this requires users to upgrade their version of Kopete, which is not always possible. This could also happen again and with some others closed protocol.

For those who can't upgrade and need to use MSN with Kopete it is possible to connect using Jabber transports.

What are Jabber Transports ?

Jabber is an instant messaging protocol, like MSN or ICQ. If you don't know it already, visit the Wikimedia Jabber page.

Jabber transport allows a person from the Jabber network to communicate with persons from others networks (like MSN or ICQ).

Kopete supports others protocols natively. This is better since the support of these protocols is often more complete. Features like file transfers or avatars don't always work with transports. The features supported by a transport depend on the type of transport (which network it relays) and the version of the transport the server is running.

The support of transports in Kopete is a bit limited, but still usable.

Create a Jabber account

If you don't have a Jabber account already, you need to create one.

If you can't, or don't want host a Jabber server yourself, find a public server. There is a list of public servers available at xmpp.net If possible, select one which has a support for the gateway you want to use.

In Kopete, click Settings -> Configure, go to the accounts page and click the button to create a new account. Select the Jabber protocol. Click on the button to register a new account. Here, enter your server, your desired login and password. Once the account is created, you can click next and get connected.

Welcome to the jabber network.

Subscribe to a Gateway

• Click on the account icon (the small light on the right hand side of the statusbar).
• Select Services... and retrieve the list of services from the server.

Select the gateway you want and click subscribe.

If your server doesn't have the gateway you want, you still can use the gateway of another server. It seems that you have to choose development version (with tag "DEVELOPMENT") of transport to work with MSN.

Servers that are known to support it:

• jabber.org.uk
• myjabber.net
• bloodyxml.com
• borderlinenormal.com
• (add more here)

Enter here your MSN login and password (or ICQ,....)

Now all your MSN contacts will be added to the Jabber list.

How to add MSN contacts

If you can't add the contact [email protected], and if your MSN gateway is called msn.bar.com here is how to do it.

In Kopete, click add new contact. Select your Jabber account and fill in the contact identifier (it's friend%[email protected] in the above example, i.e, replace @ by %, and add the gateway name).