The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

[Moderator note: this is the primary Pidgin (formerly "Gaim") program thread. View database entry]

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Pidgin v2.0

Although John T. Haller hasn't got a version out yet, the Pidgin team has a step by step guide on making Pidgin portable.

It is pretty easy to set up; instructions here.

While I haven't checked the Registry yet, the Pidgin team DOES have a set of instructions on making it portable. It involves installing Pidgin to a machine, copying selected files to the USB drive, downloading a new executable that is coded for portability (soft directory links!), and then running it. Copying over existing settings from the host machine is easy as well.

You can find the instructions here:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using% ... maUSBDrive

(One of the developers wrote that the v2.0.0 portable executable is identical to v2.0.0 since there haven't been any changes to it.)

Edit: Sorry, didn't see the already given link above.

Actually, you no longer need to download an executable. Now you only need to rename Pidgin.exe to pidgin-portable.exe thanks to the new 2.1.0 update. I even packed a distro for the forum and 7zipped it and posted it in another thread. If anyone wants me to repost it I will.

Also available, X-Pidgin v2.10.10 [rev17], updated 2014-10-23:http://www.winpenpack.com/main/download.php?view.551.

Is there a command line parameter with which Pidgin can be started, that can make it save the settings in custom location? The "Official Procedure" to make it portable looks little complicated.

Peter202 wrote:Is there a command line parameter with which Pidgin can be started, that can make it save the settings in custom location? The "Official Procedure" to make it portable looks little complicated.

It may look that way, but it isn't, really -- the gist of the procedure is composed of 2 downloads, making 1 new folder, extracting the archives into it, 3 renaming operations, 1 folder copy, and 6 individual deletion instructions...

1. Download ZIP files from SF.net, currently the following:
   sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/GTK+ for Windows/2.16.6.2/gtk-runtime-2.16.6.2.zip
   sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/2.10.11/pidgin-2.10.11-win32-bin.zip
   .
2. Extract both to a folder, say 'Pidgin-Portable';
   .
3. Rename extracted folders inside 'Pidgin-Portable' respectively to 'GTK' and 'Pidgin';
   .
4. Go inside 'Pidgin-Portable\GTK\share\themes\MS-Windows' and copy the 'gtk-2.0' folder to 'Pidgin-Portable\GTK\etc' (overwrite if asked);
   .
5. Go to 'Pidgin-Portable\GTK' and delete folders 'share' and 'manifest';
   .
6. Go to 'Pidgin-Portable\Pidgin\plugins' and delete folder 'perl' and files 'perl.dll' and 'tcl.dll';
   .
7. Go to 'Pidgin-Portable\Pidgin' and delete folder 'spellcheck';
   .
8. Still in 'Pidgin-Portable\Pidgin', rename 'pidgin.exe' to 'pidgin-portable.exe'.

Your settings will be saved to the 'Pidgin-Portable\.purple' folder created on first run. Anything I left out, can be (re)done later...

Thanks, i followed the instructions and created the portable Pidgin.

When i have to upgrade the portable setup of Pidgin what procedure i have to follow? Also, if i want to install spell checker for english or install a plugin what is the right way to do that?

@Peter202: please refer back to Pidgin's wiki FAQ entry, that's all clearly explained there.

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using Pidgin#RunningWindowsPidginFromaUSBDrivePortableMode

Do report here if you encounter any problems...

The pidgin 2.11.0 changelog was amusing:

Stop truncating passwords to 8 characters like old ICQ clients did. (#16692). If you actually needed this, truncate your password manually by pressing backspace a few times.

Also you can evidently use IRC with OTR (client-agnostic encryption). I'm surprised it took this long.

Pidgin at version 2.12.0, downloads, downloads and changes:

version 2.12.0 (03/09/2017):

libpurple:

• Fix an out of bounds memory read in purple_markup_unescape_entity.
  CVE-2017-2640
• Fix use of uninitialised memory if running non-debug-enabled versions of glib
• Updated AIM dev and dist ID's to new ones that were assigned by AOL.
• TLS certificate verification now uses SHA-256 checksums.
• Fixed SASL external auth for Freenode.
• Removed the MSN protocol plugin. It has been unusable and dormant for some time. MSNP18 has been discontinued and the protocol plugin would require a large update to start working again. See: http://ismsndeadyet.com/ The third-party Pidgin SkypeWeb plugin, however, should provide enough functionality as a replacement if people still want to use MSN: https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgi ... r/skypeweb
• Removed Mxit protocol plugin. The service was closed at the end of September 2016. See https://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/2016- ... 024078.htm
• Removed the MySpaceIM protocol plugin. The service has been defunct for a long time. (#15356)
• Remove the Yahoo! protocol plugin. Yahoo has completely reimplemented their protocol, so this version is no longer operable as of August 5th, 2016: https://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/145715934 ... ur-product A new protocol plugin has been written to support the new protocol. It can be found here: https://github.com/EionRobb/funyahoo-plusplus This also removes support for Yahoo! Japan. According to http://messenger.yahoo.co.jp/ the service ended March 26th, 2014.
• Remove the Facebook (XMPP) account option. According to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat the XMPP Chat API service ended April 30th, 2015. A new protocol plugin has been written, using a different method, to support Facebook. It can be found at https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/wiki
• Fixed gnutls certificate validation errors that mainly affected google (Dequis)

General

• Replaced instances of d.pidgin.im with developer.pidgin.im and updated the urls to use https. (#17036)

IRC

• Fixed issue of messages being silently cut off at 500 characters. Large messages are now split into parts and sent one by one. (#4753)

A lot of defunct trash (Facebook, MSN, MySpaceIM, Yahoo!) has been removed, nice!

Upstream Pidgin v2.13.0 released (changelog at bitbucket.org/pidgin/www/src/tip/htdocs/ChangeLog).

Midas wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 9:57 am Upstream Pidgin v2.13.0 released (changelog at bitbucket.org/pidgin/www/src/tip/htdocs/ChangeLog).

I'm probably well overdue for rewriting the program entry somewhat as there have been a lot of changes in messaging servers in the past two years.