With the latest Plasma Active rootfs tarball for Nexus 7 there is also working Jabber/XMPP. I didn’t notice this at first as the system time was set two years in the past and due to this the certificate for the Jabber server was silently failing. 😉

Essentially, instant messaging functionality is provided via telepathy. This way different IM protocols (like Jabber/XMPP or ICQ) can be used. Right now there is “just” support for Jabber/XMPP working in the current Plasma Active version.

The tools/apps used for getting everything to work are the apps from Nemomobile: accounts-ui and qmlmessages (“Messages” in apps view). Both come pre-installed with the latest Plasma Active Nexus 7 rootfs tarball.

I set up Jabber/XMPP as follows:

1. Open the “accounts-ui” app.
2. Add a new XMPP account (first field is username@jabber-server.com, second field is the password).
3. Click the newly created account.
4. In the menu chose first “Enable” and afterwards “Request Online”.
5. Refresh. You should see your presence (in the field “Current:”) change to “available”.

Make sure that your system time is set properly and that your jabber-server has a valid SSL certificate. Self-signed certificates (e.g., as is the case for jabber.org) won’t work. Also note that you won’t get feedback if something with the certificate is wrong. It will simply appear to be stuck in changing your presence.

To chat open the qmlmessages (“Messages” in apps view) app and start a chat with someone. The “To:” name is your-buddies-username@your-buddies-jabber-server.org.