I just recently realized that BitchX is no longer in the Debian repos on one of my servers. Apparently there is some kind of library dependency issue. I decided to try some of the other IRC clients for the command line (I use XChat for most of my IRC chatting but sometimes I want to chat from a CLI environment). The rest of the clients, however, sucked. Especially when one is used to BitchX. I could have probably gotten used to one of them but I just wasn’t impressed. I tried Irssi, ircii, weechat, epic4, and something called Pork. None of them felt right.
So, I downloaded the BitchX source. I couldn’t get it to compile (probably why it isn’t in the repos any longer). Configure didn’t report any errors. Make failed with a generic error that ld ended status 1. All that means to me is that ld ended with an error. I’m sure I could have tracked it down eventually but instead I downloaded the Linux binaries. Miraculously, the binary worked without any problems whatsoever.
So, if you are like me and really like BitchX for IRC, download the binaries from: http://www.bitchx.com/download.php
Once you have the binary, you can place it in /usr/bin with:
cp BitchX /usr/bin
and create a symlink like so:
ln -s /usr/bin/BitchX /usr/bin/bitchx
I created the symlink only because I’m used to starting BitchX using the lowercase version of the command. The symlink is optional.