Getting Pidgin, getting Gtalk

I installed Ubuntu 7.04 which has Gaim preinstalled in it. For some reason I was not able to get Gtalk working on gaim. I checked up the google support page and found that there weren't any instructions specific to gaim, and now there is Pidgin. So I decided to get Pidgin hoping that GTalk would work on it.

First I downloaded the Pidgin source from http://pidgin.im/ because that seemed to be the preferable thing to do. I realized that I will first have to install some prerequisites before I compile the source. So I did this:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libxml2-dev gettext libnss-dev libnspr-dev

The first package libgtk2.0 dev installs GTK2.0 development headers. I also installed the build-dep gaim package which installs the list of dependencies on your machine that the ubuntu developers used for gaim. After that I uninstalled gaim and gaim-data using synaptic.

Once you are done with that, you are ready to compile the Pidgin source code. First extract the source from the tar archive. Then run ./configure. My friend told me that a regular ./configure won't suffice here because things like google talk may not work. So I configured it with the following switches:

./configure --enable-dbus --enable-nm --enable-mono --enable-gnutls=yes --enable-nss=yes --enable-gtkspell=yes --enable-plugins

That it:
make
sudo make install

That installs Pidgin on the system. To get GTalk working on my Pidgin, in addition to the instructions listed on the google support page, I also had to click on the advanced tab of the account setting and check the "Force old (port 5223) SSL", set connection port to 5223 and connect server to talk.google.com.