ubuntu: December 2007 Archives

If you are an Ubuntu user you might have noticed that some packages don't get updated in the official repositories when software creators release new versions. Users who want to have latest and greatest installed on their computer face two options. First is to install the packages they need from some unofficial repo, the second is to compile the software from source. Although the 1st option might seem to be the easiest i'll show you that compiling your own packages is not that hard.

So, let's install the latest Pidgin package from source.

Solve dependencies

sudo apt-get -y build-dep pidgin

Download latest pidgin source (go to http://www.pidgin.im to locate the latest version. In my case 2.3.1)

wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pidgin/pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2

Extract the source and compile

tar jxvf pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2
cd pidgin-2.3.1
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && sudo make install

That's it! Now you have latest pidgin installed :)