Pidgin



Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messenger built upon libpurple. With USE=ncurses, another libpurple-based messenger, finch, is built.

Removing unneeded protocols
Compilation of unneeded protocol plugins may be disabled, in order to reduce compile and start-up times—Pidgin checks all plug-ins on start-up.

To do so, unset unneeded protocol plugins via pidgin's individual portage environment:

The default protocols are irc,jabber,oscar,yahoo,simple,msn,myspace. If you wish to build IRC and Jabber only, set DYNAMIC_PRPLS to these:

Continue to merge pidgin as per usual.

Built-in protocols
prpls can be built into libpurple.so, reducing overhead and installed size. To do so, use the individual portage environment, mentioned in the ''Removing unneeded protocols above.

Set the appropriate text within the file for said environment:

DYNAMIC_PRPLS is a variable set in the pidgin ebuild, so it must be unset and with-static-prpls must be passed to configure.

Message encryption
To beuse message encryption, you must emerge the following package:

When the package is installed, restart Pidgin, then click on the "Tools" menu, click on "Plugins" and look for the plugin named "Off-The-Record Messaging". Click on it, then choose "Generate", in order to generate a fingerprint for the current pidgin user.

To encrypt a current conversation, click on the "OTR" button next to the text input box. Once you have verified the certificate of the other person using a different communication medium, tell this plugin that you trust the other person. Be aware that the fingerprints of others change when they re-install their computer, or log in using another machine.

Useful information about setting up OTR on Gentoo also can be found here.

Finch
To run the console-based version of pidgin, use this command:

Keyboard assignment for finch can be found here:

To emerge finch only (without X, pidgin etc.) disable gtk and gstreamer USE flags: