Trac is being migrated to new services! Issues can be found in our new YouTrack instance and WIKI pages can be found on our website.

Version 2 (modified by John Bailey, 17 years ago) (diff)

--

Frequently Asked Questions About SSL

This information was compiled by Stu Tomlinson with much help from #pidgin.

General Notes

Libpurple needs to be compiled with SSL support in order to work with MSN, Novell GroupWise, and some Jabber/XMPP servers which support or require it, such as Google Talk. You will need either GNUTLS and all its dependencies or Mozilla NSS and NSPR.

Mozilla 1.5 will not provide all the pieces for NSPR and NSS due to breakage in Mozilla that prevents the installation of some header (.h) files. You might be able to install mozilla-{nss,nspr}{,-devel} from mozilla 1.4, or install NSS from source, in parallel and link against those for libpurple. Or just use GNUTLS.

OpenSSL is not an option for SSL support in libpurple because the OpenSSL license (a BSD-style license with an advertising clause) is not compatible with the libpurple license (GPL).

Distribution-specific Notes

Debian

Use the Debian packages. If you want to compile from source, run apt-get build-dep pidgin. This will grab all Pidgin's dependencies. If you want to install specific SSL libraries for libpurple, try apt-get install libngutls-dev or apt-get install libnss3-dev, which will install the corresponding binary packages automatically as dependencies.

Note that libgnutls and libgnutls-dev from Debian Woody are known NOT to work.

Fedora Core 4, 5, and 6

Use the Pidgin-provided yum repository.

Gentoo

Gentoo's Pidgin ebuilds should "Just Work." Before you do anything, sync your Portage package database:

~$ emerge sync

The most recent Pidgin version is usually not in Gentoo stable right away. To ensure you are using the most recent release in Portage, you may add the following line to /etc/portage/package.keywords, using ~ppc, ~sparc, etc instead of ~x86 if you are not using the x86 architecture:

net-im/pidgin ~x86

Portage will build and install the NSS and NSPR packages automatically if you do not have them. Alternatively, if you add the following line to /etc/portage/package.use, Portage will automatically use GNUTLS instead of Mozilla NSS, building and installing GNUTLS if necessary:

net-im/pidgin gnutls

After you are satisfied with your configuration, run the following command to install the latest version available in Portage, along with any needed dependencies:

emerge pidgin

Also, don't forget that emerge is not a transitive verb!

Linux From Scratch

If you're not able to figure this out on your own already, see the notes below on compiling from source.

Mandrake

Mandriva

Red Hat Linux 9 and earlier

Please join this century and upgrade to a newer distribution, such as the current release of Fedora Core.

Slackware 9.1, 10, and 10.1

There are sometimes third-party packages for these Slackware distributions here.

If you would like to build Pidgin from source, and have Mozilla installed, you can try the following. Note that if Mozilla 1.4 is not your installed version, you will need to replace that with the correct version number. Also, at some point, Mozilla 1.7.5 was removed from Slackware-Current and replaced with Mozilla Firefox. This will probably change the exact location for the paths listed.

~/pidgin$ ./configure --with-nss-includes=/usr/include/mozilla-1.4/nss \
> --with-nspr-includes=/usr/include/mozilla-1.4/nspr \
> --with-nss-libs=/usr/lib/mozilla-1.4 \
> --with-nspr-libs=/usr/lib/mozilla-1.4

Also, you'll need to add /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4 (again replacing versions as appropriate) to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig as root.

Firefox also includes the necessary libraries, so if you have a binary package of Pidgin that was built with SSL support you may be able to add /usr/lib/firefox to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig as root.

SuSE 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3

Third-party RPMs for these SuSE distributions are often available here. These RPMs use GNUTLS for SSL support, but GNUTLS is not provided in SuSE 8.2 or 9.0. Users of these distributions will need to also install GNUTLS, OpenCDK, and libtasn1 from the same site. SuSE 9.1 and later provide GNUTLS, and SuSE's provided GNUTLS should be used on these distributions.

If you wish to use Mozilla NSS with Pidgin, you will need to compile from source using these NSS packages from the same site as the Pidgin RPMs.

All information, including names and email addresses, entered onto this website or sent to mailing lists affiliated with this website will be public. Do not post confidential information, especially passwords!