How-To: Install Pidgin 2.6.1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty from a Launchpad PPA

Pidgin 2.6.0 was made available a few days ago, on August 19, 2009, and today Pidgin 2.6.1 was released as a bug fix version to the new stable 2.6 series. Among the features and improvements which come with 2.6.0 are:

- several changes and bug fixes in libpurple, the library used by Pidgin for its various chat protocols
- various DNS fixes
- AIM and ICQ fixes
- Gadu-Gadu fixes
- MSN new features, like support for receiving audio clips, support for receiving handwritten messages, many other fixes
- lots of XMPP fixes and improvements, like voice and video support with Jingle or the Service Discovery Browser plugin
- Yahoo! fixes and improvements
- Finch and the Pidgin GTK+ Theme control plugin also received improvements

To install Pidgin 2.6.1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope from the Pidgin developers PPA on Launchpad, just follow the instructions below:

First of all, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file with your favourite text editor (e.g. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list or gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list) and add the following two lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Next, make sure to save the file (Ctrl+O followed by Ctrl+X in Nano) and add the trusted key for this repository:

gpg --keyserver http://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys A1F196A8
gpg --export A1F196A8 | sudo apt-key add -

Now, update the packages lists:

sudo apt-get update

The next step is to uninstall your currently Pidgin installation:

sudo apt-get remove --purge pidgin

And the next step is just to install Pidgin 2.6.1 from the newly added repositories:

sudo apt-get install pidgin

This should be all.

Full Story