Me, Myself and Technology » Pidgin

Sametime (meanwhile) support in Pidgin on Arch Linux

kalpik — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:20:40 +0000

We use IBM’s Lotus Sametime as our IM client at work. And i like to be signed in all the time even on my Arch machine at home. Pidgin does support sametime protocol, but through an external library called meanwhile. Although most popular distributions have meanwhile in their main repos, Arch does not. It has the meanwhile library in AUR. And due to this, the pidgin in Arch has meanwhile support disabled. But even so, the latest stable meanwhile library (1.0.2) has a nasty bug which does not report the correct online status of buddies. Most online buddies are shown as being offline. The problem has been fixed in the SVN version, but unfortunately ALL distributions carry the buggy version of meanwhile. It took me around 5-6 months to get to the root cause of this bug, and yes, i have managed to fix it in Arch. I’m providing here a compiled version of the fixed meanwhile library (64 bit). I’m also providing a complete tutorial on how to compile pidgin with meanwhile support on Arch.

Download the fixed meanwhile library (64 bit only) from here.
Install it using pacman:

pacman -U meanwhile-1.0.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz

Install the Arch Build System:

pacman -S abs

Run abs so that it can build a repository tree (kinda like portage in Gentoo):

sudo abs

Copy the pidgin directory of abs to /tmp:

cp -r /var/abs/extra/pidgin /tmp

Go to /tmp and open the pidgin PKGBUILD in nano:

cd /tmp/pidgin
nano PKGBUILD

Go to the “build()” section and make sure you remove “–disable-meanwhile” from the configure options. The line should look like this:

./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –disable-schemas-install \

Make the package:

makepkg

Install it:

pacman -U pidgin-2.5.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz

That’s it! Now you should have sametime support in Pidgin Remember though, you will always have to compile pidgin yourself whenever a newer pidgin version hits the Arch repos.

P.S. For those of you who want to compile a fixed meanwhile on i686 (32 bit) system, follow the instructions here.

Latest Pidgin and Firefox repositories for Ubuntu Hardy

kalpik — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:05:37 +0000

Ubuntu Hardy ships with Pidgin v2.4.1 and Firefox 3.0 Beta5, while the latest Pidgin is v2.4.2 and the latest Firefox is 3.0 RC1. Here are two repositories that would always contain the latest versions of Pidgin and Firefox. Just type “gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” into the terminal, and add the following to the end of the file.

For Pidgin:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ubuntu hardy main

For Firefox:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/ubuntu hardy main

After adding the lines, just type “sudo apt-get update” and then “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” in the terminal (apt will give a warning about unauthenticated packages, but its safe to ignore the warning and type “y”). After doing this, you should have the latest versions of both Pidgin and Firefox

Yahoo censoring status messages?

kalpik — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:54:00 +0000

I discovered this when i tried to set my status message to “Benazir Bhutto killed..” it just didn’t reflect. Then i tried Pidgin’s default away message “I’m not here right now” didn’t work.. But surprisingly “I’m not here right away” works.. Harsh confirmed the behavior. Seems as if yahoo is blocking some words such as “now” and “Bhutto” in various combinations in a sentence (“now” and “Bhutto” do work as status messages). At first i though it was a problem with pidgin. But then Ankur confirmed that these words were not working with even the windows yahoo messenger client! I really don’t know what yahoo is trying to achieve but its really irritating

Latest Pidgin/Rhythmbox repository for Ubuntu

kalpik — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:22:15 +0000

Here is a repository i use on my gutsy install which always contains the latest builds of Pidgin and Rhythmbox. So no more hunting for debs or compiling sources

Steps to add the repository:

1. Open Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal)

2. Type “gksuÂ gedit /etc/apt/sources.list”

3. Go to the end of the file and add the following onto a new line:

## Latest Pidgin/Rhythmbox
deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu gutsy main

4. Save the file and close Gedit.

5. Add the public key so that apt does not complain about any authentication errors (type into terminal):

wget http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu/937215FF.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

6. Update your system (type in terminal)

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

7. Voila! You should now have the latest Pidgin and Rhythmbox!