Ubuntu

Recently  I decided I need to upgrade to Pidgin 2.5.5 on my Ubuntu install.  Oh what fun that was!

Basically after removing my old Pidgin install with the command

sudo apt-get remove pidgin

Then downloading Pidgin from here:  http://www.pidgin.im/download/

And then unpacking, and running this from the unpacked directory:

sudo ./configure

I found out I didn’t have all the packages needed for install.

So here is what I did.  Ran this from the help FAQ

sudo apt-get build-dep pidgin

But this (as noted) found I had no source files found, then I had to do a massive update to compile all the source packages by going to  “Software Sources” control panel in System -> Administration which has some boxes checking the unchecked source.

After that update, the ./configure command worked.   Then I did:

make
make check
make install

After all that, Pidgin installed; but, Pidgin didn’t work !!  errgh.

Seems Pidgin could not find libpurple.so.0

So after some digging, here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=491673

These commands did the trick:

cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libpurple.so.0 .

(don’t forget the period at the end of the above line)

Once I did that finally I had the latest Pidgin!  Took a lot more than it should, hopefully soon ” sudo apt-get install pidgin ” will yield the latest 2.5.5 build for Ubuntu users.

~J