Download Pidgin 2.6.0

Pidgin includes the long-awaited update to version 2.6.0. This multi-protocol instant messaging program can handle the networks of AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, irc, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, Silc, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo and Zephyr. During installation, you can choose from as many as seventy different languages ​​and add spell check. Pidgin is available for Windows and Linux and integrates well into Gnome 2 and KDE 3.1. For Mac OS X users, there is Adium X. The open source program is released under version 2 of the gpl license.

A large number of changes can be found in this release. The main one is a newer version of libpurple, which now enables video and speech. At the moment this only works with the XMPP protocol (Jabber and Google Talk), but others will be added in the near future. Also, the new libpurple opens the door to being able to customize the appearance of Pidgin. At the moment there are only downloads for Linux, the Windows version has yet to be released. Below is the full changelog for version 2.6.0:

libpurple

• Theme support in libpurple thanks to Justin Rodriguez’s summer of code project, with some minor additions and cleanups from Paul Aurich.
• Voice & Video framework in libpurple, thanks to Mike Ruprecht’s summer of code project in 2008.
• It should no longer be possible to end up with duplicates of buddies in a group on the buddy list.
• Removed the unmaintained and unneeded toc protocol plugin.
• Fixed NTLM authentication on big-endian systems.
• Various memory cleanups when unloading libpurple. (Nick Hebner and Stefan Becker)
• Report idle time ‘From last message sent’ should work properly.
• Better handling of corrupt certificates in the TLS Peers cache.
• More efficient buddy list and conversation search functions. (Jan Kaluza and Aman Gupta)
• Install scalable versions of the main Pidgin icon, the protocol icons, the dialog icons, and the Buddy List emblems.
• Build properly on Hurd. (Marc Dequenes)
• Various memory leaks fixed as reported by Josh Mueller.
• Properly handle an IRC buddy appearing in multiple groups.
• Escape HTML entities in usernames when written with the HTML logger.
• Don’t display MySpace? status changes as incoming IMs. (Mark Doliner and Justin Williams)

DNS

• DNS servers are re-read when DNS queries fail in case the system has moved to a new network and the old servers are not accessible.
• DNS SRV records with equal priority are sorted with respect to their weight as specified in RFC 2782. (Vijay Raghunathan)
• Don’t do IPv6 address lookups if the computer does not have an IPv6 address configured.
• Fix a leak when the UI provides its own DNS resolving UI op. (Aman Gupta)
• Don’t fork a DNS resolver process to resolve IP addresses. (Aman Gupta)
• Internationalized Domain Names are supported when libpurple is compiled against the GNU IDN library.

Environment Variables

• GnuTLS logging (disabled by default) can be controlled through the PURPLE_GNUTLS_DEBUG environment variable, which is an integer between 0 and 9 (higher is more verbose). Higher values ​​may reveal sensitive information.
• PURPLE_VERBOSE_DEBUG environment variable. Currently, this is an “on” or “off” variable. Set it to any value to turn it on and unset it to turn it off. This will optionally be used to only show less useful debug information on an as-needed basis.
• PURPLE_LEAKCHECK_HELP environment variable. Currently, this is an “on” or “off” variable. Set it to any value to turn it on and unset it to turn it off. This will be used to perform various actions that are useful when running libpurple inside of Valgrind or similar programs. Currently, it keeps plugins in memory, allowing Valgrind to perform symbol resolution of leak traces at shutdown.

AIM and ICQ

• Preliminary support for a new authentication scheme called “clientLogin.”
• Fixed a bug where your away message sometimes would not get set when you first sign on.
• Make sure links in your away messages show up as links to other people.
• For ICQ, Never change the privacy setting specified by the user.

Gadu-Gadu

• Accounts can specify a server to which to connect. (Krzysztof “kreez” Tobola)
• Correctly show tooltip status for contacts with status messages. (Krzysztof “kkszysiu” Klinikowski)
• Support for fetching buddy icons. (Krzysztof “kkszysiu” Klinikowski)
• Support connection progress steps in Gadu-Gadu. (Krzysztof “kkszysiu” Klinikowski)

MSN

• Add support for receiving handwritten (ink) messages on MSN. (Chris Stafford, Gal Topper, and Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Add support for receiving audio clips on MSN. (Chris Stafford, Gal Topper, and Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Show the invite message for buddies that requested authorization from you on MSN.
• Support sending an invite message to buddies when requesting authorization from them on MSN.
• Timeout switchboard connections aggressively (60 seconds).

XMPP

• Voice & Video support with Jingle (XEP-0166, 0167, 0176, & 0177), voice support with GTalk and voice and video support with the GMail web client. (Mike “Maiku” Ruprecht)
• Added a Service Discovery Browser plugin for Pidgin. (Andrei Mozzhuhin)
• Support for in-band byte streams for file transfers (XEP-0047). (Marcus Lundblad)
• Support for sending and receiving attentions (equivalent to “buzz” and “nudge”) using the command /buzz. (XEP-0224)
• Support for connecting using BOSH. (Tobias Markmann)
• A buddy’s local time is displayed in the Get Info dialog if the remote client supports it.
• The set_chat_topic function can unset the chat topic.
• The Ad-Hoc commands associated with our server are now always shown at login.
• Support showing and reporting idle times in the buddy list. (XEP-0256)
• Support most recent version of User Avatar. (XEP-0084 v1.1)
• Updated Entity Capabilities support. (Tobias Markmann)
• Better support for receiving remote users’ nicknames.
• /affiliate and /role will now list the room members with the specified affiliation/role if possible. (Andrei Mozzhuhin)
• Put section breaks between resources in “Get Info” to improve readability.
• Silently remove invalid XML 1.0 entities (eg ASCII control characters) from sent messages.
• XHTML markup is only included in outgoing messages when the message contains formatting.
• Show when the user was last logged in when doing “Get Info” on an offline buddy, provided the server supports it.
• Support custom smileys in MUCs (only when all participants support the “Bits of Binary” extension, and a maximum of 10 participants are in the chat to avoid getting too many fetch requests).
• Fix an issue with Jabber (pre-XMPP) servers and the user’s preference to require SSL not being respected.
• Fix an issue where Cyrus SASL DIGEST MD5 authentication might fail if the username, password, or realm (the JID domain) contain non-ASCII characters.
• Show emblem for mobile, handheld, and web clients and bots (if the other client supports it).
• Google Talk mail notifications should now work for people for whom they inexplicably did not. (Thanks to yukam for determining the reason)
• New XMPP and Google Talk accounts require SSL by default.
• Display kicks (and the reasons given) in chat rooms when an occupant is kicked.
• Fix issues with case-sensitivity of XMPP roster and case-insensitive Purple groups.
• For contacts who advertise Entity Capabilities, only send rich text markup if they support it.
• Removed support for obsoleted XEP-0022 (Message Events) and XEP-0091 (Legacy Entity Time).
• When the GNU IDN library (libidn) is available, it is used for normalization of Jabber IDs. When unavailable, internal routines are used (as in previous versions).
• Topics that contain ‘<' followed by a non-whitespace character can now be set properly.

Yahoo!/Yahoo! JAPAN

• P2P file transfer. (Sulabh Mahajan)
• Sending text messages (address to +). (Sulabh Mahajan)
• Addition of MSN buddies to Yahoo accounts by adding them as ‘msn/buddy@…’ is now supported. (Sulabh Mahajan)
• Further fixes for buddy pictures, aliases, etc.
• Yahoo! and Yahoo! JAPAN are now two separate protocol plugins that share common protocol code. You can now have the same account on both networks. Accounts should be seamlessly migrated to the new arrangement.
• Ability to set personal details for an account and for buddies in the buddylist.

Pidgin

• Added -f command line option to tell Pidgin to ignore NetworkManager and assume it has a valid network connection.
• Allow plugins to specify custom link types to the GtkIMHtml widget.
• The status message input box at the bottom of the buddy list expands correctly when starting a new line of text.
• Pressing the Enter key in the message entry box of the New Status dialog and various other dialogs now causes the cursor to move to the next line.
• Created a unified Buddy Pounce notification window for all pounces where “Pop up a notification” is selected, which avoids having a new dialog box every time a pounce is triggered. (Jorge Villasenor)
• The New Account dialog is now broken into three tabs. Proxy configuration has been moved from the Advanced tab to the new tab.
• Dragging a buddy onto a chat pops up a chat-invitation dialog. (Carlos Bederian)
• The nicks of the persons who leave the chatroom are italicized in the chat’s conversation history. The nicks are unitalicized when they rejoin.
• Always set unseen-count and unseen-state on conversations. (Joshua Stein)
• Fix a bug in ‘Conversation Colors’ plugin for RTL messages.
• Pressing the Left and Right arrow keys in the buddy list will expand and collapse buddy groups or contacts. (Peter Ruibal)
• Support saving animated custom smileys as animated images or animated custom smileys. (Andrea Piccinelli)
• Support for keyboard navigation on the status icon. (Li Yuan)
• IMG tags without ‘id’ attributes are turned into links to the image URL. (Dmitry Petroff)
• Draw the user’s buddy icon at the bottom of the Buddy List with rounded corners for visual consistency with the actual icons in the Buddy List. (Kosta Arvanitis)
• When file transfers are complete, the received file name written to the conversation window is now linked to the file.
• Fix a crash when closing a conversation tab that has unread messages when the Message Notification plugin is loaded.
• Fix a crash when closing the New Mail dialog if an account with new mail was previously disconnected while the dialog was open.
• Fix incorrect unread message counts for the new mail notifications.
• Do not lose unread messages with a hidden conversation window when new IM conversations are hidden and “Close IMs immediately when the tab is closed” is unset.

Finch

• The hardware cursor has been updated correctly. This will be useful especially for users of braille terminals, screen readers etc.
• Added a TinyURL plugin, which aids copying longer URLs.
• Fixed UTF-8 compatibility problems which could cause exits or other unrequested behavior.

Pidgin GTK+ Theme Control Plugin

• Removed mouse cursor color preferences.
• Added “Typing Notification Color” preference.
• Added “Disable Typing Notification Text” preference.
• Preferences have been reorganized into three tabs for Colors, Fonts, and Miscellaneous categories.