Pidgin with all the trimmins’ on OSX

So, first off, I really do like Adium on OSX. Its got a great interface, full featured, etc except its missing one thing. The ability to connect to Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS). Which, with my current employer, is a necessity.

Those who know me, know I hate running multiple apps to do the same thing. So, although I could run Adium for my non-Work IM and Microsoft Messenger for Work IM, I’d really prefer not to.

Fortunately there is at least one solution, some good folks have put together a plugin for Pidgin called SIPE that allows you to configure OCS accounts and so forth. All is good; I use this combo on my Windows desktops all the time, but sadly, every time I have looked, the plugin has not been ported to Adium.

But all is not lost. Apparently, now some folks have ported the (GNOME) GTK to the native OSX Quartz interface, which provides some hope for running Pidgin on OSX more natively, instead of say an X11 window.

Well, I am happy to report that I have been successful in doing just that, here’s the procedure, before I forget.

First off, install MacPorts, just following the regular procedure. Now to the fun stuff.

MacPorts has Porfiles set up for Pidgin and all its prerequisites, so first off, fire up a base install Pidgin

sudo port install pidgin +quartz +no_x11

Now just walk away for a while, there’s a lot that needs to be downloaded, compiled, and installed.

Once its done, you can try to run it, but things will probably be pretty wonky, due to some bugs in the version of pango that gets built. See issue 20924 for more information. The downside is you need to pull down the patch-pango-1.28.1-introspection-revised.diff from the bug, and use it to build a new version of pango

cd ~
wget https://svn.macports.org/attachment/ticket/20924/patch-pango-1.28.1-introspection-revised.diff
cd /opt/local/var/macports/sources/
cd rsync.macports.org/release/ports/x11/pango
patch < ~/patch-pango-1.28.1-introspection-revised.diff
sudo port install pango +quartz +no_x11
sudo port -f activate pango @1.28.1_0+no_x11+quartz

Ok, from here, you should now have a working version of Pidgin that you can fire up, and connect to your Yahoo, AIM & Jabber buddies with.

Next stop, installing SIPE. Grab the multi-platform file from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/files/ and extract it.

Now, configure the package, and build it:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH
./configure --prefix=/opt/local
make

Now, I had a problem where the build stopped at one point because gcc warnings were being considered errors. I fixed this by removing the -Werror directives from the QUALITY_FLAGS variable in the Makefiles. The build completed correctly after that.

Finally, install the plugin with

sudo make install

And that is it.

Now, one more thing for bonus points, I try to use Off-The-Record (OTR) messaging when possible, so I like to have the OTR plugin available in Pidgin as well. MacPorts has an answer for that:

sudo port install libotr
sudo port install pidgin-otr

Done.