A solution for pidgin errors and problems:

I just installed Pidgin, and had major issues right off the bat. It didn't link the libpurple libraries, so I did that manually. And the fun started, I kept getting "ssl unavailable" for msn and gtalk ...strange that gaim worked.

You may have received the following errors:

pidgin: error while loading shared libraries: libpurple.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

and then:

ssl unavailable

Following the instructions and checking if NSS and GNuTLS was installed helped nothing; as they were there. I eventually sat and watched the compile for errors...and found the problem.

If you have this issue, uninstall pidgin ( in the pidgin source dir run ./configure && make uninstall) Then check if you have the Development sources for GnuTLS and NSS installed, it will not compile SSL support otherwise. Once the DEV sources are installed, re install ( ./configure && make && make install)

Once completed, type as root:
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libpurple.so.0 /usr/lib/

and then:
pidgin

Everything should be fine now. You can then make an application link on the desktop.

If you find any other errors and solutions for them...post them here please.

Have fun!!

TsueDesu a.k.a The Stick.