Looking for a good instant messaging client

[markw10]

I'm a Linux newbie and for my new job I have to do a lot of instant messaging to clients. They are on a variety of services, aim, icq, msn, myspace, facebook, yahoo, Google Talk, jabber, and .mac/ichat
Is there a good instant messaging client that covers most of these on one application? I am using Mandriva with KDE 4.2.

[Drunk_Mexican]

I use Pidgin and I believe it can cover most of those. I don't use Mandriva, but I'm pretty sure it's in their repos. The only downside to pidgin is that it does not support Video chat/conferencing. For video chat try Empathy, it is very new and it's downside is that it's buggy but it will probably be good to go in a few months because Ubuntu will be using it soon.

[Kieren]

A also prefer Pidgin which supports most IM protocols. KDE also has it's own IM client which supports a number of protocols called Kopete so you may want to try that one too and see which you like best

[reed9]

Kopete and pidgin are both quite good. In your case I would recommend Kopete if only because it's going to integrate better with the KDE desktop environment.