I was doing a little random surfing and came across an im_kit installation tutorial, written by Luc Schrijvers for the BeBUG audience. The document is not too out of date, and works equally well for Haiku/BeOS or ZETA users, so I think it deserves some attention.

Luc's native language is not English so you will have to pardon some of the typos present. The tutorial gives a good introduction in getting the im_kit installed, from which one can make use of it immediately. The im_kit has been developed quite a lot over the course of its life, and can be found by either visiting the project homepage or the entry on BeBits.