Today, everyone uses a different instant messenger. Your boss may use Lotus Sametime, your colleague AIM, your friend Google Talk, and your kid Yahoo! Messenger. However, these all take up hard drive space, RAM, and CPU usage. In addition, many of these are proprietary and Windows-only (two big minuses for GNU/Linux users). Luckily, the free software world has an alternative that enables users to chat with users of all of these programs (and many more). It is called Pidgin.

Note: This is part 2 of an instant messenger series. Part 1 deals with the history of instant messenger clients and protocols.

History of Pidgin

Before I get started explaining how to use Pidgin, I had better spend a little time to explaining what Pidgin actually is. According to the Pidgin site:

Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

To be more specific, it can connect to AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP (the core technology of Jabber), Yahoo!, and Zephyr.

Originally, Pidgin started out as an AIM clone known as GAIM (an acronym for GTK+ AIM, later changed to simply “Gaim” to avoid naming disputes with AOL). Then, it started to add more protocol support by reverse-engineering proprietary protocols (and adding open protocols such as IRC or XMPP). Soon, it began to pick up steam. The well-known free software repository Sourceforge.net named it Project of the Month for November 1998. Adam Iser created a fork of Gaim known as Adium which allowed Macintosh users to use Gaim without X11. John T. Haller created a portable “launcher” called Portable Gaim (later renamed to Gaim Portable), which allowed users to take Gaim on their USB drive.

In 2007, Sean Egan (the head of the project) announced that his team would rename their project “Pidgin” to avoid more legal disputes with AIM (the new name is a reference to the term “pidgin”, which describes communication between people who do not share a common language. It may also be a joke related to Gaim, since pigeons are game birds).

Installation

On Windows, installing Pidgin is easy. Just download it from the Windows download page and run the installer. Note: The GTK+ package bundled with Pidgin on Windows can sometimes cause problems with the GIMP image editor. The solution is to uninstall both Pidgin and GIMP, install the latest GTK+ build from the official site, and then reinstall Pidgin and GIMP.

Macintosh users aren’t encouraged to download Pidgin at all. Instead, the developers recommend Adium, an OS X fork. If you don’t like Adium, you can install an old 1.5 build of Gaim via fink.

Pidgin offers repositories for Fedora Core, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (find them at the download page). In addition, several GNU/Linux distributions such as Gentoo offer Pidgin in their official repositories (search for pidgin in your package manager). Unfortunately, many GNU/Linux distributions don’t have it so easy. At the time of this writing, the latest version of Pidgin (2.0.1) wasn’t available in many official repositories (though the older Gaim 1.5 is mostly available). Debian offers an unstable version from their repository. Ubuntu Feisty users don’t have an official package (only users of the upcoming Gutsy 7.10 do, available here). The reason is that the metapackage ubuntu-desktop in Feisty and early versions requires the package gaim. If you don’t want to wait for Gutsy, you can mess around with some unofficial packages from GetDeb or ubuntu.pl, you can compile it from source, or you can just use the old Gaim 1.5 package pre-installed on Ubuntu (all the tutorials below will probably work with 1.5, but the screens will be different and some things will be renamed). Note that the ubuntu.pl Pidgin package conflicts with Gaim, causing Gaim to be removed and ubuntu-desktop along with it (though according to this comment or this one there are ways to keep ubuntu-desktop). The GetDeb package does not conflict with Gaim, so Gaim will stay installed (as will ubuntu-desktop). Just make sure you run Pidgin, not Gaim.

How to set up accounts

Pidgin is a great program, but it isn’t all that easy to use. The average user can be easily scared away by the fact that it isn’t intuitive when it comes to setting up accounts. The following are instructions on how to set up accounts for eight of the most popular protocols.

Setting up an AIM account

Like it or not, AIM is the most popular instant messenger on the planet (53 million users and counting). Unfortunately, AIM is full of bloatware, adware, and even spyware. That’s why many users opt for Pidgin instead. First, you’ll need an AIM or AOL screen name. If you don’t have one, register one here. Then, open Pidgin and go to Accounts→Add Edit. In the Accounts window, click the Add button. Make sure the protocol is AIM and type in your AIM or AOL screen name (e.g. johnsmith). You can also add things such as mail notification, password saving (you must type your password in the password field and check password saving), buddy icons, the local alias (the name that will show up on the network, e.g. John Smith), and proxies (under the Advanced tab). To finish, click the save button.

Figure 1: AIM account set up