Purple, Pidgin and Finch

See AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT for the list of contributors.

libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks. It supports AIM, ICQ, XMPP, MSN and Yahoo!, among others.

Pidgin is a graphical IM client written in C which uses the GTK+ toolkit.

Finch is a text-based IM client written in C which uses the ncurses toolkit.

These programs are not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, AOL nor any other company in any way.

BUILD

Read the 'INSTALL' file for more detailed directions.

These programs use the standard ./configure ; make. You need to use gmake, BSD make probably won't work. Remember, run ./configure --help to see what build options are available.

In order to compile Pidgin you need to have GTK+ 2.0 installed (as well as the development files!). The configure script will fail if you don't. If you don't have GTK+ 2.0 installed, you should install it using your distribution's package management tools.

For sound support, you also need gstreamer 0.10 or higher. For spellchecking support, you need libgtkspell (http://gtkspell.sf.net/). Your distro of choice probably already includes these, just be sure to install the development packages.

RUN

You should run 'make install' as root to make sure plugins and other files get installed into locations they want to be in. Once you've done that, you only need to run 'pidgin' or 'finch'.

To get started, simply add a new account.

If you come across a bug, please report it at: http://developer.pidgin.im

PLUGINS

If you do not wish to enable the plugin support within Purple, run the ./configure script with the --disable-plugins option and recompile your source code. This will prevent the ability to load plugins.

'make install' puts the plugins in $PREFIX/lib/purple (PREFIX being what you specified when you ./configure'd - it defaults to /usr/local). Purple looks for the plugins in that directory by default. Plugins can be installed per-user in ~/.purple/plugins as well. Pidgin and Finch also look in $PREFIX/lib/pidgin and $PREFIX/lib/finch for UI-specific, respectively.

To build a plugin from a .c file, put it in the plugins/ directory in the source and run 'make filename.so', e.g. if you have the .c file 'kickass.c', put it in the plugins/ directory, and from that directory, run 'make kickass.so'.