Pidgin

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? ...

Update: The problem has been fixed. Please see this post. A few weeks ago, Pidgin could not connect to the Yahoo! Messenger server because Yahoo! was changing its protocols. At the time, Pidgin was at version 2.5.5. Then that Yahoo! connection problem was fixed in version 2.5.7 and newer of Pidgin. Anyway, Pidgin is acting up again. This time I’m not sure what is going on, and it didn’t seem other people are experiencing the same problem – Protocol Unknown for all types of accounts. ...

I just noticed the abnormality with Pidgin 2.5.5 (running on Debian) these few days — I couldn’t connect my Yahoo messenger account at all. According to the discussion of Bug #389278 it appears that Yahoo was trying to change its protocol. A quick way to have Pidgin connecting to Yahoo messenger server again is to change the Pager server setting for the Yahoo account in Pidgin. To do this, from Pidgin: ...

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. ...