Recently Facebook switched over to their new API and dumped the XMPP protocol that was previously used for communicating through Facebook Chat. This makes it impossible to use Pidgin Instant Messenger to communicate to Facebook friends. For those that would like to continue to use Pidgin with their Facebook account, a plugin has been created that adds the new Facebook protocol to Pidgin. It is called purple-facebook.
As of the time of this post the plugin is not available from Debian's software repositories or any 3rd party repositories (that I know of). So I wanted to share how to build the plugin and install it. Some simple instructions can be found on the GitHub project page. I have also created a blog post with added information on building and installing.
Instructions for building on Unix-like systems:
- ‣ Install the required development dependencies:
‣ Get the latest source code from the GitHub project’s releases page.
Code: Select all
# apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libjson-glib-dev libpurple-dev zlib1g-dev
‣ Extract the contents of the archive, open a command line/terminal and change to the directory of the extracted source code.
If you downloaded the latest unstable version you will need to run the command ./autogen.sh from the source’s top directory
to create a configure script and Makefile. If you downloaded a release version the configure script should already be available.
‣ Run the command ./configure to generate the Makefile. If all dependencies are installed correctly there should be no errors.
‣ Run make to build the plugin files. If the plugin builds correctly you can execute make install which will install the files
libfacebook.so and libfacebook.la to the directory /usr/lib/purple-2, or wherever the libpurple plugin directory is located on your
system.