Monday, January 12, 2009

Install msn-pecan protocol plugin to Pidgin

If you have problems with connecting to MSN account with Pidgin and receive error like
Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book

then msn-pecam protocol helps.

Make sure you have following packages installed
libpurple-devel
autoconf
automake
gcc
gcc-c++
make

You can download it by typing:
$ sudo zypper install libpurple-devel autoconf automake gcc gcc-c++ make

To download latest version of msn-pecam protocol plugin for Pidgin check this link:
http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan/downloads/list

Download latest source tar.bz2 package. In my case:
$ wget http://msn-pecan.googlecode.com/files/msn-pecan-0.0.17.tar.bz2

$ tar -xvjf msn-pecan-0.0.17.tar.bz2
$ cd msn-pecan-0.0.17
$ make
$ sudo make install

This will install libmsn-pecan.so module in this path /usr/lib/purple-2/libmsn-pecan.so
Try restarting Pidgin and find WLM protocol module. If it's not there then probably problem is wrong installation path.

Find your module installation path using:
$ pidgin --debug

If you're using 64bit OS version then you need to install it to /usr/lib64/purple-2
So just do the folowing:
$ sudo mv /usr/lib/purple-2/libmsn-pecan.so /usr/lib64/purple-2
$ sudo rmdir /usr/lib/purple-2

Restart Pidgin. Change protocol from MSN to WLM. And it works fine.
Cheers!

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