Aditya Mooley

Well … it looks like Yahoo! is once again changing its protocol and everytime this happens, we, the *nix users suffers most as there is no official version of Yahoo! messenger available.

I am using Pidgin (formerly Gaim) since last 6 years and have gone through this pain of not being able to connect to Yahoo! for few days when they are changing the protocal. The time has come again as I was not able to login to my Yahoo! account since yesterday.

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Being a Kubutu user, I tried to update my version of Pidgin from 2.5.5 to the latest 2.5.7 but unfortunately, it is still not available in kubuntu repository. But I found the alternative and thought of sharing with all those who are facing the same issue. Adding the Launchpad repository to the apt sources did the trick for me. I used the following commands on my Kubuntu 9.04 to achieve this –

First run:

$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 67265eb522bdd6b1c69e66ed7fb8bee0a1f196a8

then open the sources file –

$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the following at the end of the file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu   jaunty main

and then upgrade pidgin

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade pidgin

That’s it. You can now connect to your favorite Yahoo! messenger again.

Happy chatting.

Now it’s more than two months since my transition from Fedora to Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I am enjoying trouble free running on my desktop as well as EEEPc 1000HE since then.

The one thing I am following regularly is, keeping the system uptodate using the default package manager, KPackageKit. Everything was going fine till yesterday when it started showing me 4 blocked updates. I was wondering if the updates are blocked, why are they being shown in the first place.

There was no way to remove them from the list and the KPackageKit just stuck there.

After searching for a while, it was clear that this is a issue with KPackageKit which cannot update the packages which has some other dependencies and straightaway marks them as blocked.

The only solution to get rid of these blocked updates is to do the command line upgrade by doing:

$ sudo apt-get update

followed by

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

HTH