Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat?

Ars-Gonzo asks: "I was at a conference last week, and had a surprising number of people connected to a peer-to-peer wireless LAN during the lectures. I saw several Mac users typing away during the lectures, and I found out later that they were using iChat's Rendezvous-based local chat to talk to each other. iChat's local subnet chatting functionality is supposedly based on Jabber, but I can't get a Jabber client (on Windows or Linux) to connect to iChat, locally. Has anyone seen any iChat compatible LAN-chat apps for a platform other than Mac?"

Comments

Probably not Jabber-based

[mrpuffypants]

I'm going to argue that iChat's LAN chatting mechanism probably isn't based upon Jabber at all. Jabber is a server that clients all connect to, whereas Rendezvous is a true P2P technology, where everybody connects to everybody else.

And good luck on getting 3rd-party support for other protocols in iChat. Apple's got that bolted down to AIM and Local LAN chatting.

irc, of course

[jleq]

just set up an irc server, give out the IP address, and let the conversations begin! i've had some good experiences with bircd (http://www.xs4all.nl/~beware3/irc/), it's quite lightweight, and works well

Re:irc, of course

[cgranade]

I agree. IRC may not be fully P2P, but it is very reliable and complete. There's a client for every known OS, and its name is X-Chat. Only one big problem: seizure of the server can reveal who connected, which isn't good for sharing files. For chatting, though... it works wonders.

alpha code is out there

[Anonymous Coward]

about a year old, not much has changed...
Jchat

Searched - Eimp

[Cyberop5]

I searched the web for about an hour and I wasn't able to find much. The UPNP vulnerabilities in Windows XP seemed to have scared many people away.

I was able to find this http://eimp.sourceforge.net/, but rendezvous support isn't fully integrated. The feature status is at 50% now and the developer hasn't posted anything in 4 months. There are rendezvous libraries in the latest release.

I'm in the process of trying out Eimp. Its not a very robust program, but it does seem to offer rendezvous support. I'm testing it now, I'll reply with results.

There is also JXTA - a jabber/rendezvous/zeroconf chat protocal being developed by sun.

Re:Searched - Eimp

[Cyberop5]

it only seems to support Rendezvous discovery. I can see my other system online, but I cannot chat with it. This is very buggy software. I can't remove persons on my contact list either, even if i create them. I can however, see their status. IOW, Eimp has a ways to go.

iChat does borrow from Jabber...

[Wade Tregaskis]

...but nothing useful for your purposes, in this case. The local messaging uses a subset of the Jabber protocol (as opposed to the AIM protocol used for peer->server->peer messaging). I think the file transfer code is also based in part on Jabber, although I do know that some of the essential specifics are proprietary and undocumented (the original developer made the note a few weeks ago that he can't even remember how it works anymore).

So while it does borrow from Jabber, it doesn't "use" Jabber. You can't connect to a Jabber server, nor communicate directly between Jabber & iChat.

There are some chat clients out there with similar functionality on Windows (and I believe Linux), but they're somewhat hit-and-miss affairs, from my experience. I like the suggestion to just get an iBook - I already have one :) - but a more reasonable idea is probably to look at Proteus, as someone mentioned, and think about some sort of Windows/Linux/your-poison port.

Vypress chat

[psergiu]

http://vypress.com/products/chat/
All windowsen ...

http://vypress.com/products/chat/unix/
All unixen ...

It broadcasts the messages on the local subnet, udp port 8167.

Protocol compatible with another 2 or 3 simmilar chat programs.

Used a lot in Romania in the residential networks.

Re:iTunes chat

[VisorGuy]

...how geeks meet other geeks.