Due to weird text refresh issues I have been seeing with Xchat, I have switched over to irssi as my main IRC client. One thing I have missed is GUI notify of people private messaging me. I have found an irssi script that adds this function.
1. Install libnotify-bin
sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin
2. Install notify.pl script from http://code.google.com/p/irssi-libnotify/wiki/MainPage to ~/.irssi/scripts/notify.pl
3. Set to autorun at irssi startup (optional)
ln -s ~/.irssi/scripts/notify.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/notify.pl
