Beyond the Wheel

I love the new libnotify notifications in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, but don’t really want my IM messages popping up on the top right of the screen — especially at work.

So how do you get Pidgin to just quietly blink in your system tray like it used to?

Pidgin uses libnotify as a plugin to make those notification happens, and you can turn it off like any other. Go to Tools->Plugins and find “Libnotify Popups” and uncheck it.

Then to get your old notifications back check the “Message Notification” plugin. Then go to Tools->Preferences and set “Show system tray icon” to Always on the Interface tab. Then you can right-click on your Pidgin icon in the system tray and check “Blink on New Message” so you at least know when someone is trying to chat with (distract) you.

I’m not a huge fan of Yahoo! IM, but I do have clients and co-workers that use it so I really need it to work in Pidgin. A recent protocol upgrade at Yahoo! broke Pidgin 2.5.5. I found several ‘fixes’ out there that included changing the named pager server to an IP address. But none of those worked for me.

In typical fashion I checked the official sources last but the Pidgin website has an updated version that has fixed the Yahoo! problem — http://www.pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/

In brief, we just need to get the latest version (2.5.7) from Pidgin rather than from Ubuntu sources.

Simply run these two commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
    67265eb522bdd6b1c69e66ed7fb8bee0a1f196a8

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu \
    `lsb_release --short --codename` main | \
    sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pidgin-ppa.list

And then update apt and upgrade pidgin:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install pidgin