...SeArChInG WaYs To GeT ThErE...

Fed up with keeping Facebook Home page open in your browser all the time just to chat with your Facebook buddeis??? You don't need to do that anymore. Yes, Pidgin community has done it again for you, just for you. Now plug-ins are available to enable Facebook chat on Pidgin, where you can use Facebook chat simply as you use your favorite instant messenger to KIT with your buddies. Here I'm mentioning the plugin I'm using to reach my buddies in Facebook. It's called pidgin-facebookchat. You can easily install it by downloading it into your local hard drive. It is available as a deb for Debian users, as an exe for Windows users and Red Hat users can check the future plans page to check whether the rpm is ready. The installation is really easy. Just double click on the exe or deb you downloaded and add a new account to chat with Facebook buddies by navigating to Accounts > Manage on Pidgin. Click on add tbutton there to add a new account for Facebook chat while selecting Facebook Chat as the protocol. Then you can enter your username (Your e-mail account you use to log in to Facebook) and password to enter facebook. That's all you need. Why wasting your computer resources on browser when you really don't need it? Use Pidgin.

I use Pidgin in my personal computer to chat with my buddies. It is a great tool (Chat Client) where you can log in to all you chat accounts using a single interface. Currently it supports most of the very famous messenger channels like Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, MySpace etc. But something I found a bit difficult is how pidgin notifies me when a buddy logs in/out. By default it makes a beep sound (Which you can configure to a sound source you prefer) when a buddy logs in/out and doesn't show the alias of the buddy who logged in or logged out. This was a bit uncomfortable for me to handle because to know who logged in/out, every time I had to open pidgin and look at the buddy list whenever I heard a beep sound. Finally I found an additional plugin after writing this to pidgin community in Ubuntu forum. The plugin is called libnotify-popup and comes with pidgin-libnotify package which allows pop-ups to appear on the bottom -right of the screen when a buddy logged in/out. Here goes the steps to install and configure the plugin.

1. First open a treminal by pressing Alt + F2 or by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal.
2. Type "sudo apt-get install pidgin-libnotify" to install pidgin-libnotify package.
3. After the installation, restart pidgin.
4. Now go to Tools > Plugins in Pidgin Chat Client and select libnotify-popup plugin from the list.
5. Now click Configure Plugin button at the bottom of the window and configure it to receive popup notifications when a buddy logs in/out by selecting the apprropriate check boxes.