Santiance » Pidgin

Rhythmbox & Pidgin Music Sharing

Kristopher Ives — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:30:10 +0000

Getting music from the internet is no difficult task, but that’s not quite the same as sharing music. If anyone remembers the post 2000 rise in peer-to-peer (P2P) software, such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and eDonkey, then I think you know what I’m talking about. It was always nice to see what someone else like if you found a song or movie you liked.

I use a (default) Pidgin plug-in to set my current messenger status to the song playing in Rhythmbox, since if one of my friends sees it they can ask me for the song or get an idea of my taste in music, possibly recommending another artist or album.

I use the Send To plug-in for Rhythmbox to send a track to a friend. It’s simple, and some of my friends use the Auto Accept Pidgin plugin, so the songs we share go right into our ~/Music directory and can be played in Rhythmbox quickly.

Adding Twitter to Pidgin

Kristopher Ives — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:39:16 +0000

My friend Steven was raving about a plugin that adds support for the Twitter protocol to the Pidgin instant messenger. I’ve used a lot of other Twitter clients, but this is neat because it fits in with all my other instant messaging protocols.

It would be nice if there was a PPA on Launchpad that offered this, but I don’t have the time to do that, so I just grabbed the source from SVN and did a checkinstall on it for my 64-bit system. Heres the package:

libpurple-twitter-protocol_0.20-1_amd64.deb (70 kB)

Ubuntu 9.10 to Drop Pidgin Instant Messenger

Kristopher Ives — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:39:00 +0000

It’s interesting to see what’s happening with the latest Ubuntu (9.10, Karmic Koala), which is in Alpha 4 of testing. Firstly, I would like to point out that I think the releases are getting slightly worse as of recent, which may be partly due to the economic crisis and lack of good developers being fully committed.

The features page is getting a little bit embarrassing with things like kernel updates, driver updates, and other under-the-hood changes that have been made. Compare that with a release 2 years ago (Hardy) and you’ll see many more features that impact the user, instead of what we’re getting now which are meta features.

We all love how Linux is flexible, and with Debian we can add and remove packages as our hearts desire. Ubuntu has made Empathy replace Pidgin in the upcoming release. Is this the best way to be spending our time? There are so many things that are more critical than changing the default Instant Messaging client, like:

Fast Search (since Tracker has been removed)
Multiple Desktops in Compiz (Nautilus is blocking)
Delta package updates to cut down on bandwidth (Idea has been around for a long time)