Tag Archives: pidgin

My Pidgin Ain’t Yodelling Today

Ah, the sounds of Spring…

Well, yeah, it’s the middle of summer but never mind that.  I have been having difficulties with my Yahoo connections.  I don’t use their bulky, rancid chat client.  No, I use a multi-protocol chat client.  My preferred client is Trillian but it doesn’t run perfectly on Wine (a Windows emulator I use in Ubuntu), so sometimes I bite the bullet and run Pidgin.

Pidgin is an open-source option for the multi-protocol chat clients.  Allow me to explain that for the uninitiated in the audience.  Pidgin is a program that allows one to interact within many chat venues—like Yahoo! and Windows Live and AIM—without having to run the proprietary software generously foisted on us by those behemoths.  (Pidgin also publishes its source code for all to enjoy.)

Of course those behemoths would prefer each of should use their chat client, adore the ads they place before us, and sacrifice our first borns on the alters of their corporate ledgers. But I digress.

These companies sometimes make changes to the manners in which their clients interact with their servers.  Standard operations for them.  Plays occasional havoc for the developers of applications like Trillian and Pidgin (and Adium).

Anyway, my Pidgin hasn’t been able to consistently connect to Yahoo for some time now.  After the usual research I found a couple of articles which finalized the problem (here and here).  Basically, Yahoo has changed its authentication method and Pidgin hasn’t caught up quite yet.

I went ahead and installed the beta version of Trillian Astra (their newest client, currently in beta) on my Ubuntu machine using Wine, but there are problems with the visual displays within those Trillian windows (specifically the contact list) which make it effectively unusable.

Hopefully the folks at Pidgin will be able to get this sorted out soon.  Alternatively, the folks at Wine might get the issues with Astra sorted out too.

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