If you’ve been using Gaim in the past, you probably know that it is no longer available now. The name of the program has been permanently changed to Pidgin. Even though Pidgin has been released for awhile, I’ve been still running Gaim Beta 2 until tonight. Well, not that I don’t want to install Pidgin, I just didn’t know how to do it. I tried to search for Pidgin openSUSE binary package in Google in the past for a few times without any success.

Tonight, while I was maintaining the repository list in my system, I finally could install Pidgin. So here is how you can achieve the same thing.

Add the following repository to the Yast (or Smart) package manager if it’s not already there:

<br /> [GNOME-Community]<br /> type = rpm-md<br /> name = GNOME-Community<br /> baseurl = http://software.opensuse.org/download/GNOME:/Community/openSUSE_10.2/<br />

Now, try to search for pidgin in Yast, you should see a list of packages containing: pidgin, pidgin-debuginfo, pidgin-devel, …etc. Please choose a minimum of two packages: pidgin and libpurple and install them. After finish the installation, you can launch pidgin from the menu.