I just recently started using the new version of the Pidgin instant-messenger client, which recently changed it’s rather popular name from GAIM, due to some legal problems the GAIM team had been having with AOL.

I downloaded the latest source files (at the time of writing the latest version was 2.0.1) from pidgin.im and got it extracted, compiled and installed on my just recently setup Debian 4.0 desktop system.

First, the straight forward extraction of a basic tar.bz2 file. (You might need to install the bzip2 package.)

tar -xjvf pidgin-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Next, on with the compiling…

cd pidgin-2.0.1 && ./configure

On the first couple of tries, the compiler handed me the usual starter errors, complaining about missing features, such as pearl support. But a quick skim through the compiler output revealed exactly which packages was missing.

When the compiling successfully completes. Everything seems fine and you would then move right on to the mandatory make and make install. (Don’t do this just yet!)

make && make install

But with this particular build, Pidgin has no support for the MSN-protocol, which I immediately noticed since it’s my protocol of choice. If you look for it, in the compiler output, you would find this line:

This means that you would have to install the libnss-dev package BEFORE you compile and install the program if you want Pidgin to be able to handle the MSN-protocol, as well as the Google-Talk protocol.

In my case, the package version I needed to get for my Debian distribution was libnss3-dev.

apt-get install libnss3-dev

Please note that the above command only complies with a Debian distribution.

When you’ve installed the libnss-dev package on your system, you will have to recompile (./configure) and do the mandatory make and make install once more.

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