Adium message styles in Pidgin (Ubuntu Karmic)
I always liked Adium on OS X a lot, it’s the Mac fork of the famous Pidgin, a multi-protocol messaging client. I really LOVE Pidgin – but one thing was always missing – the fancy look. But finally, it can be helped!
Here’s what to do. These steps are for Ubuntu 9.10 only.
1. Open up a terminal, and type (or paste):
sudo apt-get install pidgin-dev libpurple-dev
2. Next, add the WebKit repository, as Adium styles require WebKit on the Mac. You have to open up the Software Sources tool under System/Administration/Software Sources. There, click on “Other Software”, then “Add…”, and paste this line:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty maindeb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
The content will reload as new software just became available.
3. Back to the terminal, and paste:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libwebkit-dev
This will install required development files for WebKit.
4. Next, download THIS FILE, save it to a location of your choice.
5. In a terminal, do
bzip2 -d /path/to/pidgin-webkit.tar.bz2
to extract the file.
6. In the extracted folder there are two folders which we need to copy into your libpurple folder. This is how to do it:
cp /path/to/pidgin-webkit-folder/message_styles ~/.purple && cp /path/to/pidgin-webkit-folder/plugins ~/.purple
Close Pidgin entirely and open it again. Go to Tools / Plugins, and behold your new entry!
You can now go, to use themes of AdiumXtras.com. Beware – some themes will not work, most of them will however.
To install a new theme, download any one of your choice, extract the zip, and in the folder you will find another folder named “NameOfStyle.AdiumMessageStyle”. You need to copy this to
~/.purple/message_styles
Once you have it in there, again go to Tools / Plugins / WebKit, then select “Configure plugin”. There you will then see a list… In my example I installed iChadium, a iChat emulating message style:
As you can see you can select any sub-style you want.
Once done, behold your all-new shiny Adium on Ubuntu!
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