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I installed Ubuntu 7.04 which has Gaim preinstalled in it. For some reason I was not able to get Gtalk working on gaim. I checked up the google support page and found that there weren’t any instructions specific to gaim, and now there is Pidgin. So I decided to get Pidgin hoping that GTalk would work on it.

First I downloaded the Pidgin source from http://pidgin.im/ because that seemed to be the preferable thing to do. I realized that I will first have to install some prerequisites before I compile the source. So I did this:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev gettext libnss-dev libnspr-dev

The first package libgtk2.0 dev installs GTK2.0 development headers. I also installed the build-dep gaim package which installs the list of dependencies on your machine that the ubuntu developers used for gaim. After that I uninstalled gaim and gaim-data using synaptic.

Once you are done with that, you are ready to compile the Pidgin source code. First extract the source from the tar archive. Then run ./configure. My friend told me that a regular ./configure won’t suffice here because things like google talk may not work. So I configured it with the following switches:

./configure –enable-dbus –enable-nm –enable-mono –enable-gnutls=yes –enable-nss=yes –enable-gtkspell=yes –enable-plugins

That it:
make
sudo make install

That installs Pidgin on the system. To get GTalk working on my Pidgin, in addition to the instructions listed on the google support page, I also had to click on the advanced tab of the account setting and check the “Force old (port 5223) SSL”, set connection port to 5223 and connect server to talk.google.com.

I was doing some elementary IPC programming on linux, and was looking for the man pages of the library calls that I was using in my programs (for functions like “perror”, “execlp” etc.) ‘cos its been a while since I have done anything in C. The way to get the manual page for these calls is:

kv$ man 3 “functionName”

where the number 3 specifies section number 3, which stands for library calls.

Now, it so happens that the development man pages are excluded by default in Ubuntu linux. A quick google search told me that the name of the package I was looking for is “manpages-dev.

Do:
kv$ sudo apt-get install manpages-dev

and you get the documentation for all the methods that you want!