We use IBM’s Lotus Sametime as our IM client at work. And i like to be signed in all the time even on my Arch machine at home. Pidgin does support sametime protocol, but through an external library called meanwhile. Although most popular distributions have meanwhile in their main repos, Arch does not. It has the meanwhile library in AUR. And due to this, the pidgin in Arch has meanwhile support disabled. But even so, the latest stable meanwhile library (1.0.2) has a nasty bug which does not report the correct online status of buddies. Most online buddies are shown as being offline. The problem has been fixed in the SVN version, but unfortunately ALL distributions carry the buggy version of meanwhile. It took me around 5-6 months to get to the root cause of this bug, and yes, i have managed to fix it in Arch. I’m providing here a compiled version of the fixed meanwhile library (64 bit). I’m also providing a complete tutorial on how to compile pidgin with meanwhile support on Arch.
- Download the fixed meanwhile library (64 bit only) from here.
- Install it using pacman:
pacman -U meanwhile-1.0.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz
- Install the Arch Build System:
pacman -S abs
- Run abs so that it can build a repository tree (kinda like portage in Gentoo):
sudo abs
- Copy the pidgin directory of abs to /tmp:
cp -r /var/abs/extra/pidgin /tmp
- Go to /tmp and open the pidgin PKGBUILD in nano:
cd /tmp/pidgin
nano PKGBUILD
- Go to the “build()” section and make sure you remove “–disable-meanwhile” from the configure options. The line should look like this:
./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –disable-schemas-install \
- Make the package:
makepkg
- Install it:
pacman -U pidgin-2.5.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz
That’s it! Now you should have sametime support in Pidgin 🙂 Remember though, you will always have to compile pidgin yourself whenever a newer pidgin version hits the Arch repos.
P.S. For those of you who want to compile a fixed meanwhile on i686 (32 bit) system, follow the instructions here.