Saturday, June 02, 2007

Pidgin on Ubuntu

Pidgin isn't available in Feisty but I've managed to get it up 'n running by compiling from source. It's not that hard really. Just be sure to have all the requirements to compile & enable the features you'll be using.

First off, we'll need to download the source tarball.

:~$ wget -c http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pidgin/pidgin-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Next is to be sure all the necessary libraries & tools are installed on the system.

:~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev libgnutls-dev gettext libxml-parser-perl


GNUTLS is required if you want to use MSN and/or GoogleTalk, but it's OK to leave it out if you aren't using it ;-)

Next up, we unpack that source tarball and compile Pidgin.

:~$ tar jxvf pidgin-2.0.1.tar.bz2
:~$ cd pidgin-2.0.1
:~$ ./configure && make
:~$ sudo make install

It'll take a while between ./configure, make & make install but once it's done Pidgin is ready for action! :-)

For some reason the menu shortcut doesn't appear, but that's easily solved by a reboot. I think restarting your session would be sufficient but I was too lazy to bother. It's no biggie after all. Just run pidgin from terminal if there's no shortcut, configure some IM accounts, and you're ready to go.

The Pidgin GNOME menu entry... err... interesting? As you can see, it even runs alongside Gaim.

The Pidgin buddy list.

5 comments:

  1. On Feisty I got a missing 'msgfmt' error during the configure && make stage. To work around that I used:

    sudo apt-get install gettext

    And then try the configure && make part again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for pointing it out, Oddscurity.

    I guess one of the other packages I've previously installed must have installed that package as a dependency

    ReplyDelete
  3. Quite possibly that was it, indeed. After I tried it on a vanilla Feisty install.

    As for the icon not showing up in the menu straight away, there's something else you can do to have it show up apart from restarting the computer or session.

    go to System > Preferences > Main Menu

    Select Internet on the left, and you'll see Pidgin is there. I deselected and reselected it, and hit Close. And there's the icon without the restart.

    ReplyDelete
  4. On Fiesty I needed to add libxml-parser-perl to install the XML::Parser for perl.

    sudo apt-get install libxml-parser-perl

    and then ./configure worked

    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks :-D

    I've updated my post accordingly

    ReplyDelete