Pidgin, if any of you have used it before you definitely know how great this instant messaging client is. I have been on the Pidgin kick for quite while a now and I am absolutely loving it. If offers a wide range of plug-ins, with tons of very cool and customizable features. Pidgin is capable of handling a wide range of IM protocols including:
- AIM
- Bonjour
- Gadu-Gadu
- Google Talk
- Groupwise
- ICQ
- IRC
- MSN
- MySpaceIM
- SILC
- SIMPLE
- Sametime
- XMPP
- Yahoo!
- Zephyr
This in my opinion makes pidgin one of the most versatile IM clients I have ever used. It offers quite a few of common IM client feature like file transfer and typing notifications. It also offers a feature called buddy pounce which will notify you by doing various actions, given a buddy does certain actions. Want to learn more? Visit Pidgin’s About page. Granted the actual provider’s clients offer more specific features according to the services those providers offer. But if you are like me and just need something simple that allows you to organize all of you friends from multiple networks in one place then this is the application for you. Truly a nice open source program to handle most if not all of your instant messaging needs.
The windows installation is pretty simple, just run it and have fun. The Linux installation is a little more involved as you have to compile Pidgin yourself. Not to difficult of a task, but there are some libraries you need to install. I will just discuss the ones needed when I installed Pidgin on Ubuntu, being that it is the only Linux distro I have installed it on.
Bonjour: Howl or Avahi’s Howl. In Ubuntu you can use ‘apt-get’ so you can just type “apt-get install libavahi-compat-howl0 libavahi-compat-howl-dev”
Sametime: libmeanwhile. In Ubuntu you can use ‘apt-get’ so you can just type “apt-get install libmeanwhile1 libmeanwhile-dev”
These are the only specific ones that you will need. To get the remaining libraries needed such as the GTK library can be obtained by typin “apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev gettext libnss-dev libnspr-dev” Thats about it. For more info on how to install Pidgin on Ubuntu visit this great post in Taufan Lubis Linux Blog.
Pidgin home page: http://pidgin.im/
