Callum Macdonald » pidgin

Ubuntu Jaunty and pidgin-facebookchat 1.61

Callum — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:27:01 +0000

I was able to install pidgin-facebookchat 1.61 on Ubuntu Juanty Jackalope (9.04) by first installing the relevant libjson-glib-1.0-0 from Karmic. To find the correct deb look at the different builds on the right hand side of the page. In my case on 64-bit Ubuntu the relevant deb was this one, the 32-bit version is here.

I had to install the glib-json deb first. Otherwise the pidgin-facebookchat deb warned of an unsatisfiable dependency.

It looks like pidgin-facebookchat 1.6x is being included in Ubuntu Karmic but I’d guess it won’t be backported to Jaunty.

Magic pidgins

Callum — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:19:12 +0000

Pidgin is my instant messaging client of choice. It means my MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, ICQ and other contacts are all in one place. Today I have taken that to the next level with three new plugins.

Skype Pidgin Plugin

I need to have skype installed and running, but now I can send / receive messages from within pidgin. On linux, this is a big deal. The skype interface sucks. It lacks spell check, among other things. Now I can even send encrypted, deniable messages through Skype with the Off The Record plugin. All my other pidgin plugins work with Skype. Fantastic. Get the plugin here. (It works for poor people on Windows also).

Facebook Chat on Pidgin

More and more people have started talking to me on Facebook chat. The interface was a little ropey, I much prefer talking to people in Pidgin. For example, when somebody sends me a message, a web site has no way of letting me know. So if Facebook is open but not on the screen (say on another tab) I miss the messages. Pidgin on the other hand is great for that. Now pidgin supports facebook chat.

Twitter via Pidgin

I haven’t actually activated this plugin yet, but I have installed it. I believe it allows you to set / get Twitter messages via Pidgin. I like that idea a lot. I really liked Twitter’s IM service (before it died). But now I’m using ping.fm (invite code vivalaping) to update all my statuses in one go. So Twitter only via IM might be a bit weird. I can post to ping.fm through IM no problems, they have a Jabber interface.

Plugin Pack

Before I forget, I recently installed the available plugins from the Ubuntu repository. I grabbed all the pidgin related plugin packs that looked good. That made a big difference. Added Extra Prefs and Off The Record Messaging which were the biggest changes I think.

Pidgin is on a new level today. Here’s a pretty picture for all you visual / non techy types out there.

Pidgin character count plugin on Fedora

Callum — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:49:15 +0000

If you’re a pidgin and Twitter user like myself, it’s hard to keep your tweets under 140 characters. Dossy created a character count plugin for this very purpose.

To install on Fedora (and possibly others) simply grab the .deb file Dossy kindly published here. Open the .deb in archive manager. Open the contained data.tar.gz file. Then drop the contained “convcharcount.la” and “convcharcount.so” files into your /usr/lib/pidgin/ directory. You’ll need to do this as root.

Now open Pidgin (restart is not required), Tools > Plugins, and tick the conv. input character count plugin. Bingo, it works like a charm for me on Fedora 8 with Pidgin 2.4.1. Thanks Dossy.