Installing the XChat Version

Top  Previous  Next

There is now a minimal port of mircryption for the open-source XChat irc client (www.xchat.org) for use with Linux/BSD/MacOSX and other operating systems(!)

 

INTRODUCTION

Most mircryption development is done on windows with the Mirc irc client.  The xchat port is just for the basic functionality.  Improvements to this script are welcomed.

 

INSTALATION

The xchat port of mircryption uses the "new" plugin system of xchat, which is only available for xchat clients of version 1.9x or greater, and will NOT work on versions of xchat prior to 1.9x.

It is coded in C++, and you will need to recompile it on your computer before you can load it into xchat (unless we have provided a binary precompiled library for your platform).

To compile this code, simply change to the src/xchat subdirecotry and type:

 make

Hopefully this will build the mircryption.so shared library.  If not, you may have to modify the Makefile to suit your system.  Please let us know if you find any bugs.  After the mircryption.so library is built, you might want to copy it to a permanent location.

 

Now you must load it into xchat.  To do this manually, start xchat, confirm you are using 1.9x or greater,  then from Xchat menu, select Load Plugin, and browse to the directory where mircryption.so is and load it.

 

To have mircryption addon load each time you start xchat, copy the file mircryption.so file into the directory $(libdir)/xchat/plugins/ which usually translates to /usr/lib/xchat/plugins/ (make the dir if nonexistent).

If the addon loads properly, you should see the mircryption version displayed and you can now type /help to see a list of mircryption commands.

 

USAGE NOTE

After each time you run xchat with the mircryption addon, you *MUST* type:

 /masterkey passhrase

where passphrase is you passprhase for the key file (30-48 character).

Until you do, you will not be able to use your keys. This prevents someone else from learning your channel keys even if they get access to your files.

 

You can use the same key file as you use with mirc, just put it in the xchat install folder.

 

LIMITATIONS

Only the basic mircryption functions are supported in this xchat port:

Channel/query encryption and encrypted topics.

The xchat port can use your existing MircryptionKeys.txt keyfiles from mirc.

You must manually set the master keyfile password on startup with /masterkey.

Encrypted nicks are shown with [] but are not properly aligned if the indent nicks mode is enabled.  Either disable it or live with it or  patch the xchat source code to support it better.

Encrypted topics are shown scrambled in the window titles, even though they are decrypted at the time of joining and topic changes.

 

ISSUES

someone once got an error on linux "mircryption.so: failed to map segment from shared object: Operation not permitted"

cause was the partition where ~/.xchat2 is, has noexec option.