Crossing Over

I got the software update notice this morning that there was an Ubuntu upgrade available for me.  I clicked the software update thing, told it I wanted to install the upgrade and away it went…

The upgrade was pretty easy, though quite far from quick.  Several times during the day the install was interrupted by some prompt and I’d have to click “Forward” or something to that effect.  Certainly nothing involving brain power, but it would have been nice to just be able to leave it alone.

After the upgrade to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was done, I rebooted my system, logged in and gave it a go.

The desktop effects are much improved and functional.  No weird crashes when trying to run them this time, and also WINE seems to have reinstalled and corrected itself into working properly (there were no icons for anything WINE related before).

There is one major problem so far - the upgrade to Gusty Gibbon broke my install of Pidgin Instant Messenger.  I get error messages telling me that I need to install some SSL libraries or something.  I ran into this problem on my windows computer when I wanted to use Miranda IM to connect to GoogleTalk.  I’m sure there’s a fix for it on Ubuntu, I’m gonna have to look for it though.

When you install Ubuntu 7.04 an Instant Messaging program called GAIM gets installed on your computer as well.  It’s a pretty handy multi-protocol application that will let you connect to various IM programs (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ).  The only problem for me is that there is no built-in support for GoogleTalk.

A little bit of research led me to find that GAIM has been renamed to Pidgin for various legal reasons and Pidgin now has support for Googletalk’s protocol.  The down side is that Pidgin does not currently exist in the Add/Remove programs library.  A quick google search led me to jhcore.com’s article about installing Pidgin on your Ubuntu machine.  The instructions do use command line, but are actually very easy to use.

The only issue I found is that they’re slightly out of date, referring to a slightly outdated version of pidgin.  The good news is that by swapping the version number that is shown in jhcore’s instructions for the current version, you get the most up to date install of the application.