Pidgin

Using Pidgin

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The contents of this page relate to problems I was having with pidgin on a windows system. It was written in the Autumn of 2008 and both windows and pidgin have had new releases or updates since then. I can't imagine that it remains of much use. i.e. this page is out of date and not very useful now. I should probably amend the wiki page.

Introduction

I use Pidgin as a multi-protocol client for my instant messenger.

In September 2008, my team has opened an XMPP chat room to facilitate our work. XMPP is the protocol used by jabber.org and google talk. My experience is that pidgin beyond version 2.0.1 struggles with XMMP chat rooms on a Windows platform although my experience is only with Windows XP. I have now upgraded the video driver and so far the problem has gone away, and I have written this up on my blog, at an article called google talk and pidgin, published on 10th October 2008.

The symptoms are described below.

I have previously had problems over the summer using the XMPP chat rooms and so when I was advised to regress from version 2.5,1 back to version 2.0.1, I was happy to do so. This involved regressing the GTK library as well which is now at

• GTK+ Runtime: 2.10.11
• Glib Runtime: 2.12.11

Pidgin 2.5.1

The XMPP chat room seems much more stable.

Googletalk needs to use the googlemail.com domain, despite the documentation suggesting that non google mail account users should use gmail.com. I don't use SSL. Everything else defaults, the full parameter set is,

Basic Tab
protocol : xmpp
domain : googlemail.com
resource : Home
Advanced Tab
Require SSL/TLS, Force old port (5222), Allow plain text .... : All Unchecked
Connect Port: 5222
Connect Server: talk.google.com
File Transfer Proxies : proxy.jabber.org

I have documented this also at the Google Talk Discussion site. I hope they'll mark it as an answer.

I originally wrote Google Talk won't login. I checked out this advice at manast.com and played with the SSL parameter having set the Force Old port to true and set the connect port to 433. Superceded 10th October 2008.

Symptoms

When a chatroom is opened the mouse cursor disappears when over any of the screen written to by pidgin. Also the keyboard shortcuts are corrupted. It makes using screen objects almost impossible. This makes multiple chat sessions very difficult.

TRAC at www.pidgin.im

I ran a search using the query terms "pidgin version 2 cursor focus" to look for a previous similar bug.

Links

• Google >> Support >> Answers >> Talk >> Pidgin
• Google Talk >> Help >> Discuss >> 3rd party clients >> topics
• Google Talk >> Help >> Discuss >> 3rd party clients >>googletalk won't work on pidgin