I fixed the Pidgin “Unknown Protocol” problem just five minutes after my previous post. I’m going to describe how I found the problem and how I fixed it. If you’re interested, keep reading.

In the previous post, I mentioned that I would completely remove the Pidgin package, including its configuration files:

# apt-get --purge remove pidgin

I did that and then re-installed Pidgin, but unfortunately, it didn’t fix anything.

Then I checked the About dialog (Help > About) and noticed it listed libpurple 2.5.4 under Pidgin 2.5.6. This had to be the source of the problem! I remembered that libpurple had been upgraded to 2.5.6, and Aptitude said so. So what could possibly be wrong?

Screenshot-About Pidgin

A while back, I had installed Pidgin from the source code. However, I was quite sure that I had properly removed it—I went into the Pidgin source directory and executed # make uninstall. Well, according to Bug #385639, old libpurple files can be left behind in /usr/local/lib.

kenno@san7:/usr/local/lib$ ls
finch                       libpurple.so.0          pkgconfig   site_ruby
gnt                         libpurple.so.0.5.4      purple-2    xemacs
libpurple-client.so.0       perl                    python2.4
libpurple-client.so.0.5.4   pidgin                  python2.5

So, I needed to remove these unwanted libraries manually:

kenno@san7:/usr/local/lib$ sudo rm libpurple*

Now, let’s run Pidgin again… and… that’s it. The problem has been fixed!

Screenshot-Add Account

For the record, I have since upgraded Pidgin to 2.5.8 (an unstable package at the time of this writing), and everything works as expected. Now, I’m a happy Pidgin user again.