Until Facebook actually support Jabber as promised there is a great plugin for Pidgin which let’s you use Facebook Chat like any other protocol. It was created by a guy called Eoin Robb and is hosted up on Google Code. You can find the project page with links to the various downloads here. It was easy to set up and update in Ubuntu which has been handy as there has been 27 updates so far.
Just download the facebook_icons.zip file and extract it to /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocol. Then download the .deb file, install and you’re done. Keep checking the page for updates and if there are any download the new .deb and install it again.
Once that’s done just add your Facebook Chat account to Pidgin as you would add anything else. Screen name is the email address you used when you registered with Facebook. Your full buddy list won’t appear straight away but will gradually build up as more of your friends appear online. According to the plugin’s future plans wiki this will all be addressed in the future.
Hopefully this won’t have to be done forever, wish they would hurry up though.
Hi — this is a great tip! Please consider posting any future tips at http://www.ubuntukungfu.org — the only website dedicated purely to Ubuntu tips, tricks, hints, and hacks. It’s just like Digg. Once you’ve created an account, posting a new entry takes seconds, and you can add a bookmark to make it even easier.
[...] manager based on libpurple – to establish and maintain the connection. The plugin can be used directly with Pidgin for similar [...]