Hugo Pereira 25 October 2008 14:10

For those having problems with gaim 2.0beta3.1 present in the Ubuntu 6.10 (like frequent crashes), and want do install the lastest version without breaking future systems upgrades, and without installing third-part packages (of unknown quality), fallow this small tutorial that will teach who to install it on your home directory.

First, you need to download the latest version of gaim, from the official homepage, and installing the base Ubuntu packages for compiling it:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Next step is download and installing the GNU TLS library development tools, needed to provide encrypted comunications with the instant messaging system (for more information go to the official homepage):

sudo apt-get install libgnutls-dev

Now that we have all the components, lets uncompress the files downloaded from the gaim site, and compile, like this:

tar xvfz gaim-2.0.0beta6.tar.gz
cd gaim-2.0.0beta6
./configure --prefix=$HOME --enable-gnutls=yes
make
make install

It will create some directories in your home directory, with all the files needed to run gaim. To run gaim, just type:

/home/yourlogin/bin/gaim

That's all!

A very interesting plugin is the guifications, that shows a little message on the right corner of your screen, when, for example, some of your friends is online. You can download the sources from where.

To install it, like with gaim, you need to uncompress the sources package and compile:

tar xvfz gaim-guifications-2.13beta6.tar.gz
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Now you have the gaim with guifications! Just configure it and enjoy!