Getting the SILC plugin to work with pidgin on ubuntu 7.04

maybe its common knowledge to everyone else, but since i couldnt find a good answer with google i'll post up how i got the silc plugin and googletalk to work with pidgin on ubuntu 7.04.

first ubuntu has some stupid ass permissions on alot of stuff and you have to use sudo for everything, i'm still undecided if ubuntu is staying around, but this can even cause you to be unable to read files and folders that you own (like i said stupid)

well when you start up pidgin as your user account everything works pretty good, except when you try to run your silc module. you'll probably get a "cant create silc key pair" error. googling wont do you much good, and you'll look where it tells you the key is /home/$userid/.silc/public_key.pub & private_key.prv and you wont have any keys there. Copying keys over from another silc client. wont work.

so the fix is to run pidgin as root so it will generate the keys for you.

cg@segfault:~$ sudo pidgin
Password:
Public key has been saved into `/root/.silc/public_key.pub'.
Private key has been saved into `/root/.silc/private_key.prv'.

after that, copy those new spiffy keys from /root/ to your home directory

cg@segfault:~$ sudo su
root@segfault:/home/cg# cp /root/.silc/public_key.pub /home/cg/.silc/
root@segfault:/home/cg# cp /root/.silc/private_key.prv /home/cg/.silc/

things should work after that.

i also had issues with ssl support, google actually helped out this time and i found

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/FAQssl

you need to compile with the libgnutls package.

sudo apt-get install libgnutls-dev

then recompile from source

./configure --enable-gnutls

MSN and GoogleTalk should work after that.