Gah. Got a reasonable distance really easily. It was reporting and downloading statuses and avatars. However, it was throwing errors when I tried initiating conversations. I probably should pursue this further since I'm sure the issue at hand can be diagnosed reasonably smoothly, but I just discovered that there is a technology for Jabber servers called Transports; essentially adapters to other protocols like MSN.

The latest version of the MSN Transport (pymsnt) uses the very same pymsn applied for telepathy-butterfly! http://delx.net.au/projects/pymsnt/

The major risk is that this adds yet another party you must trust with login info, and to make matters worse most of the easily trustable servers (eg: Jabber.org) do not host MSN transports. Gizmo5 uses Jabber and has an MSN transport, although I suspect it is a bit dated. Does the trick for me though. (Gizmo Project is definitely trustworthy - and very active - and that's the important bit. Some day they'll update their MSN transport and I will be happy).
Easiest to do the initial setup via the Gizmo client, but then you can use the device's native chat client connecting to chat.gizmoproject.com via Jabber.

I guess the best approach, if you can, is to host your own Jabber server and put the transport there. (My reason #9 out of 10 to set up a miniature personal server).

This approach is a bit funny, but I bet it saves a bit of battery life, too, since now the device just has the one connection to a single Jabber server. Oh, and it rescues you from that Enormous Pidgin dependency.


If anyone else wants to play with the Butterfly stuff, there is the connection manager profile for rtcomm. Create the following in /usr/share/osso-rtcomm/butterfly.profile: