MrPingouin's Igloo

When I was in college (studying computer sciences), my IM contact list had more "jabber" addresses than msn ones. Then I restarted my studies (3D animation), and the msn part of my contacts grown up immediatly.

But I still can't use the default windows msn client. I can't stand it. Some of you people may know the alternatives. Here are two of them.

Bitlbee
You belong to this magical part of the human population still using IRC ?
Just connect to irc://im.bitlbee.org , bitlbee is a gateway (built using the libgaim) that makes im-protocols (yahoo, aim/icq, msn, jabber) accessible through irc. Well, you don't have any avatars, you don't have either file transfers or webcams, but you can talk to them through your good old irc client. It's a great piece of software.

Emesene
For the graphical clients, the most complete multi-platforms msn client was aMSN. But it's written in tK, it's not really eye-candy and sometimes kinda unstable. But it supports almost all the msn-only-features except the games. A new alternate client written in gtk2 is born, it's called Emesene, it doesn't support either file transfers or webcams yet, but it's an active project, I guess there won't be too much time until it does support them.

[1] http://amsn.sf.net
[2] http://emesene.org
[3] http://www.bitlbee.org

If you're looking for more alternatives clients, try to google Pidgin, Psi or Miranda