This section explains the concepts behind EbQt and eb-lite, mainly for the benefit of users who want to know more about the program before deciding to install it. If you just want to know how to use it, you can skip this section.
EbQt is part of Everybuddy, which provides several instant-messaging and chat services (e.g. MSN Messenger, ICQ and IRC) in one program. It uses eb-lite, a new version of Everybuddy rewritten to provide no interface itself, but instead to communicate with a separate interface program. EbQt is one such interface, using Qt/X11 (the same toolkit as KDE).
You can connect several interfaces at once, and interfaces can be on a different machine from eb-lite, running a different operating system. There could be a web-based interface, or even an interface using speech recognition and synthesis. You can even leave eb-lite running with no interface at all, and it will hold messages for you until you return and connect an interface.
At the time of writing, other interfaces are being written for:
To give you more help in deciding whether EbQt meets your needs if you haven't already installed it, here are some screenshots.
The Buddies tab shows your contact list, like a folder tree in most file browsers, starting with groups, which contain contacts, which contain accounts (hidden here). You can click the box showing "contacts" and change to "accounts", which will expand all the contacts to show their accounts.
The other box, showing "all" here, can be set to "online", to show only online contacts (those who have at least one account online).
These are your accounts that you can (tell eb-lite to) sign in with. The bottom half is for entering your account settings, such as passwords.
This tab is for connecting to eb-lite. Usually you just click "Local cookie" (to read the file written by eb-lite) and then "Connect". The "launch local..." button isn't implemented yet.
This is a conversation over IRC (i.e. using /msg commands). It's displayed just like any other one-to-one conversation. Meredydd assures me that support for aliases (e.g. cmb rather than the slightly cumbersome cmb@irc.w...) is on his TODO list.
Main buttons from left to right: toggle showing timestamps, toggle showing the account boxes below (with which you can switch to a different means of talking to the same contact), toggle raw HTML mode (as opposed to the bold/italic/... buttons), ignore this contact, send (like pressing return), close.