accessing Yahoo chatrooms in Pidgin
 

Is anyone else having trouble entering Yahoo chatrooms using Pidgin? Using someone else's instructions, I fixed the recent connection problem that was caused by Yahoo changing the server address or whatever you call it; but I when I try to enter a chatroom, I can't. No error message; just nothing.

Have you updated pidgin? There was a new release (2.5.7) to address yahoo issues.

my repositories don't have the updated version
 

I haven't yet, because the repositories my distro (MEPIS 8) uses apparently don't have the latest Pidgin, and I haven't learned, at least not fully, how to either (a)add repositories; (b) manually download programs and all their dependencies without making a hopeless mess.

About adding repositories to Synaptic: I'm not sure whether my problem is entering the information incorrectly, entering websites that actually aren't repositories, or both. (The one I tried to enter as a repository was ppa.launchpad.net. That site seems to have only an Ubuntu version of Pidgin, but I thought that would probably work in MEPIS because they're both Debian-based.)

Since I couldn't add the site to the repositories in Synaptic, I then tried to download and install the latest Pidgin and all its dependencies, one by one (using KPackage, because I can't make Synaptic install .deb packages). I got so many errors, most or all of them saying the item depends on some other item, that I gave up. Then I had to uninstall some new files that I successfully installed, because the old Pidgin wouldn't work with them.

EDIT: Oops, I see that I used my current account (newbiesforever) instead of my old abandoned one (ashokanfarewell) to respond, this time. Forgot to log out and then log in as ashokanfarewell.
Oh, well, I can't do anything about it. Anyway, ashokanfarewell and newbiesforever are the same individual.:D