multi-protocol instant messaging library

libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks. Currently supported are: AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Napster, Zephyr, Gadu-Gadu, Bonjour, Groupwise, Sametime, SILC, and SIMPLE.

I have very little doubt that my biggest disappointment and frustration with Ubuntu 7.10 is that pidgin (which was gaim in prior releases) still does not have SILC support built in. I think the frustration is just that th fix is so trivial and has been reported for so long. Still I suppose it’s not considered a big enough priority to warrant anyone’s time though, as noted below, it seems like the Ubuntu folks deliberately pulled functional SILC support from the Debian pidgin package. However, since this release will not ship with functional SILC support in pidgin here is the procedure I used to get SILC working in pidgin under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).