Facebook Messenger can be used again in Pidgin. The popular social network closed its XMPP support earlier this year, and for this reason Pidgin could no longer use the messaging client to communicate with your friends. But for those of you who miss this functionality, there is a new Plugin on the market that will allow you to use it again. We are talking about purple-facebook.
This Plugin has been in development for about two months and there is still work to be done, but it is already fully functional and everything is going as expected.
According to what it says on its wiki, the Plugin from Facebook Messenger has already been implemented for the development version of libpurple, which has yet to be released. In fact, the project purple-facebook It's a throwback from what it should be purple3 to what today is purple2, the version of libpurple used by Pidgin and other messaging clients.
The main reasons we can give to use this Plugin instead of the standalone version of Facebook Messenger they are summarized in have all the messaging protocols in one place and, in addition, the integration with the desktop so good that Pidgin offers. This includes desktop notifications, taskbar alerts, a launcher for Unity, the unread message count, and so on.
Moment el Plugin does not support adding or removing friends, but these are two functions that are being worked on. There are some advanced features like link preview or stickers for which there is still no support.
How to install purple-facebook on Pidgin
For to install purple-facebook and re-integrate Pidgin with Facebook Messenger, open a terminal and enter the following commands:
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs)/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jgeboski.list" cd /tmp && wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs)/Release.key sudo apt-key add - < Release.key sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install purple-facebook
Once you have installed it, you just have to go to Pidgin and add your account. As simple as that. Do not hesitate to come and tell us about your experience if you dare to try the method.
It does not work. in step two it returns the following:
cd / tmp && wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs) /Release.key
–2015-10-31 10:33:45– http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_15.10/Release.key
Solving download.opensuse.org (download.opensuse.org)… 195.135.221.134, 2001: 67c: 2178: 8 :: 13
Connecting with download.opensuse.org (download.opensuse.org) [195.135.221.134]: 80… connected.
HTTP request sent, waiting for response… 404 Not Found
2015-10-31 10:33:45 ERROR 404: Not Found.