Pidgin All in One Chat

Let me start by saying that after a long period of time of being online I amassed a large collection of online identities that I use for many different things. For instance I have a AIM account that is used solely for my phone that I can connect to and send out messages, my main account that is then forwarded to my phone when I am not connected to the Internet at all. Plus there are 3 other AIM accounts that I use from time to time to mess with unsuspecting friends. There is also a YIM account, MSN account, GOOGLE account, IRC Channels, and a slew of other things that I also connect to on a almost regular basis although I still just use AIM most of the time anyway.

With so many online identities gathered up over the years it’s hard to keep things straight but when you can combine all your buddy lists into one single instance of a program it makes things so much faster. As well as being able to combine buddy lists there is also ways to separate them so you know who you are talking to through which account.

When installing pidgin it is a good idea to go ahead and update the GTK along with it, sometimes when updating pidgin GTK is not updated with it. If GTK is not upgraded it will in turn create some problems with the graphical interface, so chances are if something is wrong with the interface it can be corrected by updating GTK as well.

When installing pidgin you will be presented with this menu on the first execution of the program.

Add Chat Account

At this screen you can go ahead and press the add button and it will bring you to another form where you can then fill in the blanks to get your account up and running.

Account Options

If using Pidgin for IRC chatting I highly recommend going to the advanced page after selecting the protocol and manually setting the user name field to prevent any problems you might encounter if you have any special characters in your name.

Activate your account

Now that you have created an account all you have to do now is check the box that says enabled and you can start using Pidgin like a champ. To add more accounts from here all you have to do is repeat the steps of creating an account or you can add more later by clicking on the accounts then manage accounts menu selections, optionally you can press control+A to get to the same place.

The current stable version of Pidgin is 2.5.4 at the time of this writing.

Download Pidgin from the Pidgin Homepage.
or
Download Pidgin portable from portableapps.com, Pidgin Portable Homepage

Additionally Pidgin is provided for some distributions of Linux but I would again recommend using your package manager to grab the most recent version for your particular installation.