08.31
Like all the best things that ever happen to a man, this too came to me while idling and listening to good old kishore da’s unforgetful melodies and browsing (though not all men browse, internet is young you see :/ ) and suddenly came across something which will never let you disconnect from facebook which most of you are already glued to like in-separable half siblings.
For all you pidign users there is a plugin for pidgin which will let you sign in to your facebook account and sing-in to the facebook chat, and noone would ever know i f you are even really on facebook. Your list of friends will appear just as like any other IM account and under the facebook tag. All thanks to efforts of Eion robb who created the thing in may 2008.
Note: the plugin is available for window and other platforms too, you just need to be a piding user to do this 
Well that is not always alright when you have to install from source and that is exactly the thing with the main project site, but when scrolling down to comments you I came across a link which has rpm for fedora here and which has been very nicely maintained since fedora 8
so simply firiing
[Acedip~ #]wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/purple-facebookchat/1.60/1.fc11/i586/purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
libjson-glib-1.0.so.0 is needed by purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586oop, what is that!! well seemed like we have to get it, so after a few clicks i got it
[Acedip~ #]wget ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/Packages/json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]# rpm -ivh json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:json-glib ########################################### [100%]
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:purple-facebookchat ########################################### [100%]n the picture, you can also set your facebook status and also get all updates form facebook.
And that is it, done with the install part, now what you gotta do is simply.
- Download and install plugin for your specific platform as below
- Restart Pidgin (or go to Tools->Plugins) to redetect plugins
- Add a new account to Pidgin (Accounts->Manage Accounts->Add)
- Choose “Facebook” from the dropdown list
- Use your Facebook email address in the username field
- Start chatting
- you can also update your facebook status from here, no need to even login to facebook, until and unless you want to try out those freaky quizzes and application which maybe even god may find difficult to comprehend.
well this was a short guide to get the plugin work on fedora, a complete documentation of all platforms is available on the main package site.
What about that:
# yum install purple-facebookchat
Some people really like it complicated
yes it’s better but got the name of the package correct after I’d done it manually. I found somewhere the package name to be simply “yum install facebook” so found it weird and it dint work either (no surprise) so dint bother to give it a thought
thanks for the suggestion
In this case:
# yum search facebook
or
# yum search purple
Might come in handy next time you search something without knowing the package name.
Also, it’s really bad to advise people to take packages from « somewhere on the internet » (not speaking about giving the IP, which makes the site even more difficult to identify!)
For example, the yum command will work on any Fedora/EL distribution where yum is present (that is.. well, all recent versions
while the packages you link to might only work for one version of the OS.
Also, the user might need more dependencies than you did. So are they supposed to resolve their dependencies manually ?
Yum is here to make your life easier. Just use it. Or rather… just yum it
yes, yum is pretty easier but you wouldn’t actually know what is happening when you simply do yum (which is great when you just want it quick).
)
In my case here, I pretty much went through the comments at plugin’s main site and was so interested in the package and one thing lead to another and i landed at the rpms for fedora, and i found it easier enough to get it done.
the IP of the site being there simply came from pasting the link to the download link for the rpm there, the main link is also stated above.
well if there would have been much dependencies and (maybe) I’d have got stuck then resorting to yum would have been my last resort
And more over, it doesnt harm while you can got some extra steps (at times
Please always point people first to fedora packages on the official repository. This is because it prevents less headaches when upgrading the system and as well as security updates. Being a fedora contributor, you should know that