How to enable voice and video in pidgin (linux only :D)

Finally we have voice and video support in pidgin. It had always been so hard to understand why it is taking them so much time to implement it. Better late than never.

The new pidgin (version 2.6.1) has been released with media support in linux only at the moment. It was done by someone as summer of code project. You can find the list of new features and the whole story about it on their site.

Now coming to the real point. As soon as found out about this release it soon tried installing. Now the issue is that it had been released as source and though it works perfectly on most distros, it wasn't working on ubuntu 9.04 (working with earlier versions) . The problem was that jaunty isn't having the right versions of libraries needed to compile it and so the debs available on the net didn't install pidgin with voice and video support.

But things move fast in the open source world ... someone managed to compile it successfully on jaunty and has added it to ppa.

So here are the instructions:

To add the sources, go to the main menu, click System, then Administration, then Software Sources. Click on the Third-Party Software tab, then click the Add button.

Paste Code:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kalon33/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Click Add Source, then click the Add button again and add the PPA:
Code:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/korin43/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Close that window then open up a terminal and put this in:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install pidgin

This is it. It should work now :)

How to Fix the detached Video Bug in Vlc on Ubuntu 9.04

After upgrading to Jaunty when I played a video using vlc, surprisingly the video was being displayed in a separate window from the main interface of vlc. Also the controls were not being shown in it. It is really uncool as the bug had been there in intrepid for a while but was fixed soon. But the good thing is that the patch has been out quickly. You can use medigeek's repository and install/upgrade vlc from there :

Add this to your sources.list :

For Ubuntu Jaunty :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/medigeek/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

For Ubuntu Intrepid :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/medigeek/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Then update your system via this command :

$sudo apt-get update

If you are getting a keyserver/signature error at launchpad, please follow the instructions given after the next step which is the final one in case you don't encounter the error.

Now you can update your vlc (via $sudo apt-get upgrade) or using synaptic manager or using upgrade gui tool or you can install vlc if you removed it or never installed (via $sudo apt-get install vlc).

If you add a launchpad repository to your sources.list and see this kind of error :
W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 6AF0E1940624A220

Stop worrying and just follow the steps....

Download change.pl from here.

And download the required packages :

$sudo apt-get install libhtml-parser-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl

Now make it executable by going to the directory in which the script has been saved and then

$chmod +x change.pl

Then run the script using:

$perl change.pl

Enter your root password when it is asked.That is all.