geek help please

[taimatsu]

Please could someone remind me how to install pidgin when it is not in my usual list of apps in Adept Manager? (I am runnign KDE, Debian.) I can DL the compressed files from the website but I can't remember what i should do with them after that. And I don't know what to add to sources.list to get Adept to find the thing.

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I'd use apt-get install pidgin in a console running as root.

my sources.list has
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

if you're running etch rather than lenny, replace "lenny" with "etch"

[diffrentcolours]

Etch has gaim; Lenny has pidgin, because of the renaming.

[diffrentcolours]

Pidgin's download page doesn't provide Debian packages, so you can't add anything to sources.list to have Adept install it.

The compressed files you've downloaded will be the source code, which you'll need to compile yourself, which is a complicated operation.

However, you should be able to use backports to install an unofficial, recent version of pidgin pre-compiled for Etch. The instructions seem simple - just add

deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main

to sources.list, and then run (as root, from a terminal window)

aptitude -t etch-backports install pidgin.

[diffrentcolours]

In fact, since IIRC you want to install pidgin because you're having problems on MSN with Kopete, you could just try installing the backported later version of Kopete and see if that helps?

[diffrentcolours]

D'oh, you probably need an aptitude upgrade ahead of the install...

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, good point *blush*. And "change your OS version" is a bit drastic advice to install an IM client.