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I have been using Pidgin as a multi-protocol client for my instant messenger services since about 2008. This page is now marked as deprecated. The contents of this page originally relate to problems I was having with pidgin on a windows system. It was written in the Autumn of 2008 and both windows and pidgin have had many new releases or updates since then. I can’t imagine that it remains of much use. i.e. this page is out of date and not very useful now. I recognised on copying the page from its source that the page required amendment so in Dec 2014, I needed to document the installation of themes I moved the 2008 content to the comments section.

Themes

In 2014, as we had moved on from Windows XP, the theme management features of Pidgin became attractive to allow it to fit in more easily.

One approach is to edit the GTK preferences, document on this page,

One needs to be careful how one unpacks these, the themes need to have the correct name hierarchy, i.e. %appdata%\.purple\themes\${Theme Name}\purple\*, some installation techniques may leave one with the theme name repeated twice.

Protocol Helpers

Lync & TRM need SIPE, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/, when installing this using the NSIS installer, this worked fine, as you’d expect since there’s little google evidence that it doesn’t.

Skype & Reuters Messeneger needed its own plugin

4 Replies

  1. I have been moving forward with Pidgin since I first opened this page but I needed to update it in Dec 2014. I moved much of the content which had become out dated to comments.

    In September 2008, my team has opened an XMPP chat room to facilitate our work. XMPP is the protocol used by jabber.org and google talk. My experience is that pidgin beyond version 2.0.1 struggles with XMMP chat rooms on a Windows platform although my experience is only with Windows XP. I have now upgraded the video driver and so far the problem has gone away, and I have written this up on my blog, at an article called google talk and pidgin, published on 10th October 2008.

    The symptoms are described below.

    I have previously had problems over the summer using the XMPP chat rooms and so when I was advised to regress from version 2.5,1 back to version 2.0.1, I was happy to do so. This involved regressing the GTK library as well which is now at

    GTK+ Runtime: 2.10.11
    Glib Runtime: 2.12.11

    when running pidgin 2.0.1, I am unable to install the google facebook plugin. I have been advised to re-install more recent versions of pidgin without the gtk+ upgrade. I should really try this before opening a ticket at http://developer.pidgin.im.

  2. With Pidgin 2.5.1, so written in 2008, I said the XMPP chat room seems much more stable.

    Googletalk needs to use the googlemail.com domain, despite the documentation suggesting that non google mail account users should use gmail.com. I don’t use SSL. Everything else defaults, the full parameter set is,

    Basic Tab
    protocol : xmpp
    domain : googlemail.com
    resource : Home
    Advanced Tab
    Require SSL/TLS, Force old port (5222), Allow plain text …. : All Unchecked
    Connect Port: 5222
    Connect Server: talk.google.com
    File Transfer Proxies : proxy.jabber.org

    I have documented this also at the Google Talk Discussion site. I hope they’ll mark it as an answer.

    I originally wrote Google Talk won’t login. I checked out this advice at manast.com and played with the SSL parameter having set the Force Old port to true and set the connect port to 433. Superceded 10th October 2008.

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