Pidgin install and configuration

There’s a lot of debate on which is the best chat client but at the end of the day I tend to keep coming back to pidgin. It’s espcially nice in Ubuntu because it integrates with the existing chat functionality in the toolbar. It’s also a pretty simple download process and takes practically no time at all to configure. My company uses XMPP chat servers so I can hook those in as well.

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pidgin-developers/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install pidgin
4. Using the unity menu, open pidgin.
5. It’s either going to prompt you to add an account or you can go to the Accounts > Manage Accounts > Add… button and configure it there. You can also just press Ctrl+A and get to this screen.
6. Add your accounts and you’re almost done, just to configure the plugin that manages alerts unless you’re happy with the alert on buddy sign in.
7. You can skip this step if you don’t mind getting alerted for every user sign on but as I mentioned I hook up my companies chat and it gets really old really fast to have it alert me on every user sign on so I disable this. Go to Tools > Plugins > Libnotify Popups > Configure Plugin and uncheck Buddy signs on.
8. At this point you should play around with the other plugins, some of them are really neat. I particularly like Psychic Mode which will alert you when someone is typing a message to you (even if you don’t have an existing chat with them).