Hey guys. Read this post last week, and finally though of something. Why all of this drama over an IM that isn't an official package?

Remember, there is Kopete, which is part of KDE, which is an officla package for Slackware.

I did install Pidgin, and will play with it when I get time. But will probably start to use Kopete, cause it is an official package.

later

Because it was an official package until a week or two ago. (Well, Gaim was an official package and Pidgin is the same as Gaim, rebranded...)

Huh? That is some really interesting logic you have there.

Get slackbuild for pidgin. There won't be new versions of Pidgin in Slack.

Says who?

Anyway, I suggest you have a good look at SIM-IM which is a nice replacement for Gaim/Pidgin. It is multi-protocol (yahoo, jabber, msn, icq/aim, livejournal), does not use GTK but Qt for it's GUI and supports GPG encrypted communication.
I built a package for Slackware 11.0 which I put here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/sim-im/ I used it for a while and was pretty pleased with it's looks and functionality.

Eric

I said that. Because it was moved to unsupported. But being close to Pat you know better.

I apologize, I love Pidgin. Such an improvement over Gaim, in my opinion.

As I am switching over to linux however, I figured it would be an easy start to install Pidgin since it was made first for Linux.
It took me a week! Also, forgive my noobness, but first it needed Glib. Glib needed pkg-config. pkg-config, needed something else. It got to a point where I thought it was going to ask me to find the magic wand by talking to the farmer in the east desert. After all that installation of dependencies, Pidgin wouldn't recognize Glib was installed still. Why can't it be simpler? GTK comes with Pidgin for windows, why can't its dependencies come packaged (optional) with the linux version??

They are packaged (usually). Check linuxpackages.net or slacky.it for packages or get a slackbuild and build yourself.

I reading up on the world of "slack." Can these packages be used outside of a Slackware distro?

It depends on which distro you are talking about. On Slackware based distros, usually yes. Sometimes may need some patching or conversion (like in Slax).

Does your distribution not offer packages already? Surely the old "out of date" and "1995" Slackware isn't providing newer packages of something than one of the "modern" distributions - or maybe all that FUD about Slackware is just, well, FUD. </rant>

I was using SUSE 9.1 Pro. I don't know if that means anything useful in terms of Slackware. SUSE is owned by Novell (Captain Obvious Strikes Again).

I guess I could find a Pidgin RPM? Is that similar? That is if SUSE supports the RPM format... I dunno.

I was using SUSE 9.1 Pro. I don't know if that means anything useful in terms of Slackware. SUSE is owned by Novell (Captain Obvious Strikes Again).

I guess I could find a Pidgin RPM? Is that similar? That is if SUSE supports the RPM format... I dunno.

Isn't there pidgin for suse?

Not on my disk. I am using an older version...

There is gaim 1.5 I believe on my cds.