I've been using kopete that comes bundled with Suse 9.0. Its pretty old I guess, and really unreliable. It has most of the features that I would want from such software, but it crashes too often. Overall, on a dual 500 Mhz PC with a gig of ram, Suse 9.0 seems a bit slow. KDE takes too long to load. These systems are getting old but a dual 500 Mhz system should have some decent performance.

I'm installing Suse 9.1 which has KDE 3.2 on it. That should be interesting because a number of articles had said that there was a marked improvement in performance and load times for KDE 3.2. Hopefully this will improve performance on these PC's.