How can I chat in the terminal on a local LAN?

Question

I've heard that if there are computers interconnected via LAN (as we have in our college labs), I can chat with other friend of mine, who is probably 2-3 rows ahead of me.

I did some Google on this & came to know that all this could be done via terminal, using commands-- wall, talk, write etc . I tried all , but none worked. So can anyone tell me detailed way of doing so. I doubt that I'm missing the "order" in which the steps are to be followed, or may be some packages to be installed? Please give as much details as possible.

Our college labs are currently running Ubuntu 10.04

Answer 1

I think Pidgin can do local chat with the Bonjour protocol.

Also check a similar question

Answer 2

Many such solutions are there, I experimented with cryptcat a bit. First install it:

sudo apt-get install cryptcat

In the first machine use

cryptcat -nvlp <port_number> -k <password>

and the in the second use

netcat -nv <ip_number> <port_number> -k <password>