As most everyone knows, services like Twitter and Facebook changed their APIs awhile back, effectively killing all the 3rd party client programs that we all loved using. The Fabina Socialist micromanagement has even infected the Internet, it would seem. Well, the Internet has an answer to that; for Facebook, at least, and it comes from one James Geboski. It’s called "purple-facebook", a protocol plugin that lets you chat on Facebook, using Pidgin, without having a memory-hogging browser window all the time. You can download it from: https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-facebook. Heh. I remembered how to construct an HTML link without looking it up. The coconut oil must be working.

Now, the plugin is written for the latest distros of, I believe from the comments on the wiki, the African distro (that’s Ubuntu, which sounds like the name of an African native tribe, for those of you who never got my "humor/sarcasm"). Well, being a server guy, raised on Red Hat, I run CentOS. In this case, CentOS 6.7. I ran into some issues building facebook-purple for my platform. I thought I’d post a question on the wiki, just to see if there was a quick answer.

No chance. I received an email response which reads:

"I can only assume the first error is from an old version of aclocal. As for the missing m4_esyscmd_s macro, it was introduced in autoconf-2.64, and CentOS 6 has autoconf-2.63. I really have no interest in supporting software, which was released over six years ago. I have added a check as of 7443c55, which checks for autoconf-2.64.

"You could try using ./configure with one of the release tarballs. However, it appears you are going to run into issues with json-glib being out of date as well."

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you already know that one of my "hot button" issues is being told that the solution to my problem is to upgrade/change my distro. That’s not a solution; that’s a cop-out.

The first problem I encountered was a syntax error in the Makefile.am file. The first line looked like this:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -Im4

I changed it to this:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

which worked. I guess the CentOS version of aclocal is more pedantic than the African distro’s is. I did install autoconf-2.64 which fixed the missing macro m4_esyscmd_s error. I also installed automake-1.15 from source as well. CentOS doesn’t yet have these versions packaged, so I just compiled and installed them. I’ll work on srpms later.

The json-glib-0.14.0-1.fc16.i686 is sufficient. Be sure to install the -devel package too.

I’ll assume you’ve installed all the required development headers for the kernel, glib and glibc. At this point, the plugin should compile, from autogen.sh, and install the library in /usr/lib/purple-2.

Now, download, compile & install Pidgin. I used pidgin-2.10.11.

After running the .configure script, you’ll notice a lot of options that are not compiled in. Most of those are available on the CentOS, EPEL or RPMFORGE repos.

Here’s what I ended-up with:

pidgin 2.10.11

Build GTK+ 2.x UI…………. : yes

Build console UI………….. : yes

Build for X11…………….. : yes

Enable Gestures…………… : yes

Protocols to build dynamically : bonjour gg irc jabber msn myspace mxit novell oscar sametime silc simple yahoo zephyr

Protocols to link statically.. :

Build with GStreamer support.. : yes

Build with D-Bus support…… : yes

Build with voice and video…. : yes

D-Bus services directory…… : /usr/share/dbus-1/services

Build with GNU Libidn……… : yes

Build with NetworkManager….. : yes

SSL Library/Libraries……… : Mozilla NSS and GnuTLS

Build with Cyrus SASL support. : no

Use kerberos 4 with zephyr…. : no

Use external libzephyr…….. : no

Use external libgadu………. : no

Install pixmaps…………… : yes

Old tray icon compatibility… : no

Install translations………. : yes

Has you………………….. : yes

Use XScreenSaver Extension…. : yes

Use X Session Management…… : yes

Use startup notification…… : yes

Build with GtkSpell support… : yes

Build Unity integration plugin.: no

Build with plugin support….. : yes

Build with Mono support……. : no

Build with Perl support……. : yes

Build with Tcl support…….. : yes

Build with Tk support……… : yes

Print debugging messages…… : no

Pidgin will be installed in /usr/bin.

I then ran "make" and "sudo make install". After a few minutes of i686 crunching away, Pidgin with Facebook chat capabilities was installed and working.

Any questions? Contact me on ICQ at: 156413604 and I’ll try and help you out.