---

title: 2.x.y

date: 2019-01-11T03:13:47.000Z

anchor: 2.x.y

Pidgin's default build has a lot of dependencies. This document will hopefully help you find and install them all.

These dependencies are ones that should be found in your distributions package manager.

Assuming you have all of the necessary libraries and their headers installed (see the next few questions), you compile libpurple, Pidgin and Finch just like most applications:

% tar xjvf pidgin-2.x.y.tar.bz2

% cd pidgin-2.x.y

% ./configure && make && sudo make install

This will install libpurple, Pidgin and Finch to `/usr/local`. If you want to install it elsewhere, pass `--prefix=/some/other/prefix` to `./configure`. (You really don't want to install it to `/usr`.) See `./configure --help` for other options you can change at compile-time.

If you got the source tree from our Mercurial database (which you probably shouldn't have), you'll need to run `./autogen.sh` instead of `./configure` the first time around. If you get an error like the following, you may need a newer version of automake.

running /usr/bin/automake -a -c --gnu... failed.

Makefile.am:79: directory should not contain `/'

pidgin/pixmaps/Makefile.am:4: directory should not contain `/'

If you are trying to compile on Windows, you need the answer to a different question.

You're probably missing some dependencies. The `configure` script will tell you when you are missing required dependencies. Remember that if you're using an RPM-based (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SUSE, Mandriva, etc.) or Debian-based system (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) that having just a library's package installed is not sufficient--you must also have the `-devel` (RPM systems) or `-dev` (Debian-based systems) package for each library installed. If `configure` is succeeding, but `make` fails, this is harder to diagnose and you will probably want to drop by the IRC channel or XMPP conference listed on [Community](/community) to get help.

You need to install the development headers; these are the `-dev` packages. A simple `apt-get build-dep pidgin` will find and install all of the required header packages for you.

If `apt-get build-dep` fails with a message like

E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list

then you need to add `deb-src` lines to your `/etc/apt/sources.list` corresponding to each of the `deb` lines already there. If editing configuration files scares you, Ubuntu has a "Software Sources" control panel in _System_ -> _Administration_ which has some magic checkboxes to do this for you.

RPM-based distribution users may find `yum-builddep pidgin-VERSION.src.rpm` useful if a source RPM is available and the distribution uses the yum tools.

Note that the `yum-builddep` command is in the `yum-utils` package, which is not necessarily installed by default.

Type `patch -p0 < something.diff` from the top level of the source directory (`pidgin/`, not `pidgin/pidgin/` or `pidgin/finch/`). If that does not work, try `patch -p1 < something.diff`.

There are actually two ways:

- Run `./configure` with the `--with-static-prpls` option with the `--disable-plugins`. This will let you choose which protocols to include by specifying them as a comma-separated list, such as the following (but note that you won't be able to use any other protocols or plugins): `./configure --disable-plugins --with-static-prpls=irc,yahoo`

- Use the `--with-dynamic-prpls` option to `./configure` by specifying a comma-separated list, like so: `./configure --with-dynamic-prpls=aim,icq,yahoo`

Sure. Pass `--disable-gtkui` to `./configure`.