Thursday, June 25, 2009

Compiling Pidgin from source. Updated

It seems that a better method suggested by Donald P. Kong in the mydebian mailing list works better than compiling pidgin from scratch. Basically, you can use Apt-Pinning. A method to install unstable packages on a stable debian distribution. This is assuming that the package you want to install exist on the unstable version of debian and all dependencies can be resolve. Otherwise,

If the package still does not exist under unstable version of debian, you can use the method below.
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Recently, I had trouble using pidgin. The pidgin I have installed is 2.4.3-4lenny2. though I usually just wait a while and aptitude update and upgrade for the latest version when using sid, however, on Lenny it seems to be a little bit slower, and I don't know if its the x86_64 bit architecture that I'm using or it just takes time to have the latest version of pidgin debian package to be included into Lenny repository. Seems yahoo made some changes to the server, yahoo messenger plugin does not work anymore on Pidgin. As of this date, the best way to go around this problem is to get the latest 2.5.7 version. Unfortunately, there is no .deb package for this yet on lenny. I can't wait. Yahoo messenger is already part of the daily life routine. And I dont want to boot on windows or install a VM for windows.

So what I did, was I had to compile it from scratch.
Long story short, just for the sake of documentation for others, I have included what I did here.


$ wget -c http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pidgin/pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ tar zjvf pidgin-2.5.7.tar.bz2
$ cd pidgin-2.5.7
$ aptitude install intltool libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libdbus-1-dev gnutls-dev libnss3-dev
$ ./configure --disable-screensaver --disable-startup-notification --disable-gtkspell --disable-meanwhile --disable-avahi --disable-dbus --disable-perl --disable-tcl
$ aptitude purge pidgin
$ make
$ make install
$ ldconfig

I choose to disable some features of pidgin since I didn't think I will need it. I just need it to work until lenny comes up with an stable and updated working package.

After that, you can run pidgin as usual and connect to yahoo without any problems. The above instructions may not work since my PC is setup differently, if it doesn't, write a comment or join our mailing list. Maybe we can help you out.


Here are some references on the yahoo issues on pidgin. [http://theflamingbanker.blogspot.com/2009/06/some-clarification-on-yahoo-issues.html]

4 comments:

0xff said...

it works with my Ubuntu 9.04 as well, yeah-same root.

Alice said...

I have a debian on amd-64 config, and this doesn't seem to work for me. Was able to go allright up to the make and make install and I am getting exceptions:
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

Unknown said...

Alice: Thatt's odd. ./configure should set up everything for you. Maybe you miss a step? Make sure you have the gcc compiler required and some of the files you need. Otherwise, try the other method suggested by donald. It seems to work well. Using a package manager is better, less headache.

Alice said...

Was able to install and use Kopete. I don't have any issues with it any more. Would recommend it gladly