Charl van Niekerk » Blog: Pidgin

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I have quite a disliking for Gaim. Although it gets the job done, the interface feels really old-school.

Today finally I upgraded to the latest version of Pidgin. For those that don't know, Pidgin is the successor of Gaim. There are some unofficial packages available for Ubuntu Dapper, but since I don't install binaries from untrusted sources for security reasons I decided to download the sources and compile from scratch. I had to install the packages libgtk2.0-dev and libxml-sax-expat-perl first and then the usual ./configure, make and sudo make install. After that I launched pidgin like any other app and configured it. Lots of my settings were imported from Gaim so this was no major task. The configuration dialog was pretty simple and minimalist anyway, in typical Gnome style.

I was very impressed with the new interface. It's very modern and sleek. The status system finally allows me to set a status message even while I'm not marked as away. The status message textbox disappearing the whole time was rather irritating though.

The old Gaim kept crashing every time I attempted to log into Windows Live Messenger. No more hassles however with Pidgin, as I expected. And since Pidgin has support for separate socks proxy server settings for each account, I can now get into Messenger while on local-only ADSL while having my Jabber account go through a direct connection to the local South African server jabber.obsidian.co.za.

There were a few issues however. Firstly, the English spell checking didn't work anymore. I found the FAQ item How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?:

Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.

There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.

That kind-of sucks, doesn't it? One of the major reasons to use Gaim was always the out-of-the-box English spell checking support (to see Afrikaans, Dutch, and the other languages I speak over there would have been even better naturally). Maybe I'll look into this again once I have more time.

Another weird issue is that the auto-away sets itself even when my computer is not in idle. Gaim used to work perfectly here but Pidgin stuffs this up. Also, the exact spelling of Pidgin is rather irritating to me. I like an easy-to-spell word and often I catch myself typing "pigin" or "pidin" now. Maybe I'm just dyslectic, dunno.

Everything ran perfectly for a couple of hours, then I tried to set my status (it incorrectly set me as auto-away again) and it crashed. When I tried to launch it again, I got this error message:

charlvn@nova:~$ pidgin

(pidgin:26548): Pango-WARNING **: Error loading GPOS table 4097
Segmentation fault
charlvn@nova:~$

I moved all the configuration (~/.gaim) in case that got corrupted somehow but no change. Maybe I should reinstall? Really, really irritating. At least it seems like Gaim is still running. Any advice about solving the above error would be appreciated though. It seems like I might have to upgrade Pango or glib for this but I wonder why it only started to happen all of a sudden. Weird! Will update this post with the fix if / when I find it. :)

Update: I made the incorrect assumption that ~/.gaim was the place it stores its configuration files since there was no ~/.pidgin. However, after doing a sudo updatedb; locate accounts.xml I found that the right place to look is actually ~/.purple. I simply deleted that directory and Pidgin ran again. It kept producing the Pango warning but it runs nevertheless.

However, running it while ~/.gaim exists now lets it pop up a migration error message and exit. I just moved ~/.gaim to somewhere else and it worked fine, although of course not importing any settings. After ~/.purple has been created in the first run, you can move ~/.gaim back if you like.

4 Comments

Comment by Jonathan Hitchcock on Saturday, July 21, 2007 8:24:00 AM

Firstly, how is downloading random sourcecode from somewhere and installing it on your system any less "secure" than downloading a random binary package and installing it on your system? All you've done is give yourself the illusion of security, in return for dumping a large amount of unmanaged files all over your system, which are going to sit there and be wasted for the rest of your system's life, because there's no easy way to uninstall them.

Secondly, doing an 'ls -latr' in your home directory is a much quicker way to find out where it saved your config files ;-)

Comment by Charl van Niekerk on Saturday, July 21, 2007 5:22:00 PM

Firstly, the source code was downloaded from the official site. The binary package was not official, it was hosted on some stupid free file host where any idiot can upload anything. I can't believe there's no official packages yet; I hope this will be rectified soon and also APT enabled.

Secondly, I did do an ls -a but the thing is that I have a shitload of configuration files in my home directory created by various applications. When I saw "purple" I did not associate it with "pidgin". Maybe I should have, but take into account this was just before 1 o'clock in the morning. :)

Comment by http.refresh on Saturday, July 21, 2007 7:22:00 PM

Installing the source code is actually less secure than using the Debian package which is in the multiverse repositories of Ubuntu (which is how I believe the Debian disto you are using)

so long
http.refresh

Comment by Charl van Niekerk on Saturday, July 21, 2007 10:23:00 PM

I have multiverse enabled in my sources.list but there is no package available for Ubuntu 6.06. Otherwise, I would have naturally used that.