Empathy is an instant messaging application for the GNOME Desktop. It supports text, voice & video chat, and file transfers and most used messaging systems such as MSN and Google Talk. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala comes with Empathy as a default instant messaging client. Although I am using Empathy 2.28.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 in this tutorial, everything mentioned will be valid also on most other distributions like Fedora, Mandriva or OpenSUSE.