You will need the following:

• Wine
• MSN Messenger installer
• Winetricks

MSN Messenger 7.5 recommended, newer versions are likely not going to work.

Ubuntu/Debian based distros are recommended the most.

1. Install Wine

2. Install Winetricks

sudo apt-get install winetricks

3. Download the MSN Messenger installer from the Escargot website.

4. Complete the MSN Messenger installation.

5. If you're planning to use the Escargot server, run RUN_AFTER_INSTALL.exe. (You can patch the MSN Messenger client with it)

You may need to download msvbvm60.dll for the program to launch.

6. Open your terminal and type winetricks riched20 gdiplus msxml3 tahoma riched30 msls3. It will install all required dependencies for MSN Messenger to work properly.

The winetricks command will take a very long time, it's supposed to download all the dependencies from the Micro$oft's site but for some reason it's all deleted, because of that it uses the Wayback Machine.

7. One all that's done, you can now open MSN Messenger and sign in.

Note: Some stuff like notifications may not work.