Talk consists of two parts: talk itself, which is the user interface. Talk initiates the talk requests and negotiates with the suitable talk daemons. talkd, the talk daemon. Talkd announces an invitation to talk to a user on its' local machine and acts like a rendezvous point for inter-machine talks. The socket address's of the invitING talk process is kept at the local talkd of the invitEE. Talkd must run as root, and should be forked off on boot along with the other daemons. There is no provision for automatic restart of talkd. If for some reason it dies, it must be restarted by hand. Since talkd opens a special addresses socket (517 at the present time), the first talkd to run will lock out any other talkd. The locked out talkd will sit and bitch every 15 seconds for about five minutes, so don't leave it running. So, to install: run 'make install' from the top of the talk source directory. The install will fail if an older version of talkd is still running. If it does fail because of a 'text file busy' error, kill the old talkd and 'make install' again. execute '/usr/lib/talkd' to start the daemon immediately. Install a line in /etc/rc or /etc/rc.local to fork talkd off in background on reboot. Try talk. If it immediately fails with 'Bad system call', then you should recompile ctl.c with the -DGETSOCK flag and remake talk. This makes talk use getsockname (actually syscall(150)) instead socketaddr(). This will go away once 4.1c stabilizes.