I found Parmesan quite easy to set up – unfortunately I now find most of my friends are using AIM. Am I correct that I will not be able to chat with them?

I’m afraid that’s right – Parmesan talks the MSN Messenger protocol only, and I don’t have any immediate plans to change this (it would be an awful lot of work). I think the Unix porting project is looking at some IM clients that do support AIM, something like Pidgin, so it’s worth checking over there.