How to Install Pidgin in Ubuntu

On May 4, the developers of Gaim Internet Messenger announced Pidgin as a new name for Gaim because of the previous legal conflicts with AOL regarding naming conventions. The new release with the name change also offered new functionality and new features. The Pidgin project is now split into three ideas. The Finch text-mode client previously known as Gaim-text, the libpurple library which is the main component of this project and the Pidgin GUI client.

The latest version of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, released on April 19, 2007 has the older Gaim Internet Messenger Installed. To download the latest version of Pidgin, follow this instructions:

Open your terminal and type in:

wget http://download.ubuntu.pl/_Feisty_Fawn/pidgin/pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

Install .deb packages using the following command

sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

You can access Pidgin by going to Applications and the Internet Category. Pidgin supports a total of 14 Instant Messengers which includes Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, MSN, SILC, Sametime, Yahoo!, QQ, SIMPLE, XMPP (Jabber), and Zephyr. Another one to join the list is MySpaceIM as it is on the Pidgin’s Google Summer of Code (SoC) projects.