Free pidgin chat software for linux

Pidgin, previously known as Gaim, is a multi-protocol instant messaging client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. Pidgin messenger is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, SILC, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.
Pidgin users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.
Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, typing notification, and MSN window closing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features.
A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more.
Pidgin runs on a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Qtopia (Sharp Zaurus and iPaq).
Pidgin integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1s system tray, as well as Windowss own system tray. This allows you to work with Pidgin without requiring the buddy list window to be up at all times.
Pidgin is under constant development, and releases are usually frequent. The latest news regarding Pidgin can be found on the news page.
Enhancements:
- libpurple:
- Core changes to allow UIs to use second-granularity for scheduling. Pidgin and Finch, which use the glib event loop, were changed to use g_timeout_add_seconds() on glib >= 2.14 when possible. This allows glib to better group our longer timers to increase power efficiency. (Arjan van de Ven with Intel Corporation)
- No longer linkifies screennames containing @ signs in join/part notifications in chats
- With the HTML logger, images in conversations are now saved. NOTE: Saved images are not yet displayed when loading logs.
- Added support for QIP logs to the Log Reader plugin (Michael Shkutkov)
Pidgin:
- Ensure only one copy of Pidgin is running with a given configuration directory. The net effect of this is that trying to start Pidgin a second time will raise the buddy list. (Gabriel Schulhof)
- Undo capability in the conversation window
- The formatting toolbar has been reorganized to be more concise.
- A new status area has been added to the top of conversations to provide additional detail about the buddy, including buddy icon, protocol and status message.
- Show idle times in the buddy list as days, hours, seconds
Finch:
- Theres support for workspaces now (details in the manpage)
- Theres a new custom window manager, Irssi
- Some improvements for tab-completion, tooltip and the password entries
- Some bugs regarding search results fixed
- A new DBus-script to create a docklet for finch
- Support for showing empty groups in the buddy list (Eric Polino)

SILC project is part of the official Pidgin distribution and by downloading Pidgin you will also get the SILC protocol support in it. If you download sources and compile them you will get the SILC support automatically.

If you download binary version of Pidgin, you will need to download a separate SILC Pidgin plugin package. In addition, you will also need to download and install the SILC Toolkit in order to get the SILC libraries. All the following packages are available courtesy of the Pidgin project.

The following binary packages include the SILC Pidgin plugin. You can install the SILC Pidgin plugin into your system and get SILC support in Pidgin automatically. Note that, you will also need to download and install the SILC Toolkit. Windows version includes the SILC libraries, and downloading SILC Toolkit is not necessary.

Knotify for Pidgin is a plugin for the Pidgin chat client that uses Knotify to do notifications. This is for those who like pidgin but dont like the lack of KDE integration.

pidgin-festival is a plugin for Pidgin that interfaces with the popular program festival. It allows for instant messages to be spoken by festival so you can hear it through your speakers.

Installation:

Untar the archive:

tar zxvf pidgin-festival-VERSION.tar.gz

Run autogen

./autogen.sh

Configure:

./configure

or to install using a custom install of Pidgin:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/pidgin/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=/opt/pidgin

As long as you havent gotten any error messages during the configure script, youll be read to compile. To compile just type make:

make

Pidgin-Festival will install to the pidgin lib directory. This directory is usually /usr/local/lib/pidgin, so be sure you have write access to these directories, or use su to become root and then run make install:

make install

Once thats done, you are good to go. Restart Pidgin, go into preferences, then to plugins. Enable Festival.

Perl Chat is a project that consists of a client and a server, both written in perl.

The goal of this project is to create a chat server that can be used on smaller networks such as a college campus or a business network.

Both the client and the server are written in Perl, and the client uses the Tk module to generate its GUI.

Installation:

First of all you need a working version of Perl. Preferably 5.6 but 5.005X should also work fine. For versions of Perl Chat < 0.1.0 you will need to compile Perl with Threads. (Keep in mind that Threads are still experimental) I designed this program with Perl 5.6.0 which can be found HERE.

You will need to read the installation instructions to compile it with Threads. I advise anyone who is doing this to install this new version of perl into /usr/local/ so as to not overwrite your old perl. Then by changing the first line of the script you can toggle between the different installs of perl.

pidgin-libnotify is a pidgin plugin that enables popups when someone logs in or messages you.

pidgin-libnotify works much like guifications, but using the new notification framework, libnotify.

The project has some configuration options, to show popups when a buddy signs on, on new messages and on new conversations only.

IoChatto is a chat client which you can use in the JXTA platform.

Its interface is similar to many IRC chat clients, but you can have presence information for every channel, and its design is fully decentralized.

Peekko Chat is a new Firefox extension that makes every web page a location where people can congregate.
Peekko Chat adds a toolbar to Firefox that shows how many people are in that pages chat room and allows you to instantly connect with them.
Installation:
- Install the extension by clicking on the following link using Firefox 1.5.
- Click on the "Options" button in the toolbar and select a set of nicknames to give yourself. If your nickname is taken, it will use one of your alternate nicknames. Note: If you skip this step, you might be given an unfavorable nickname from the nickname generator like "kurblatz18".
- To see how many people are at a given page, click "Connect."