Pidgin

[Pidgin] is an open-source instant messaging client. It supports aim, yahoo, msn, and just about every protocol in existence. It was formerly known as gaim, but had to change it's name for legal reasons.

[Pidgin] is also a term for a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade.

Installing from yum

From Installing to SD Card. If you try this, please update this page with whether or not it works.

This *almost* works out of the box, save for one missing dependency in the yum repository.

If you first install the RPM from here:

ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/development/i386/os/Fedora/NetworkManager-glib-0.6.5-2.fc7.i386.rpm

You can then easily do a YUM install of pidgin.

Building from source

Notes:

• A couple of people have successfully installed from source, while working out these instructions. We had false starts, etc., so no one has typed these start to finish. If you do follow these instructions, please update the page with how it went. (including whether you needed the other notes)
  • If you had problems, other people may be able to help.
  • If this works for people, we can remove this note.
• I got a memory error, I closed all of my open activities other than console and journal, and then it went fine. Does this happen for other people?
• I installed gcc-g++ as well. It didn't help the issue I was trying to get it to fix, but it may have been needed later.
• Can someone get a count of how much space all of the yum installs needed? I wasn't counting, but I got the sense that it was a lot (relative to the 1GB of the OLPC).

<code>
su -l
yum install make gcc perl-XML-Parser glib2-devel.i386 glibc-headers gtk2-devel libxml2-devel
cd /usr/src
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pidgin/pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2
bunzip2 pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2
tar -xvf pidgin-2.3.1.tar
./configure
make
make install
</code>