I’ve always had problems configuring ICQ account in my pidgin in Debian. Somehow it never worked although I tried all these different combinations like “Use clientlogin” or “Use SSL”, etc, etc, etc. It never worked out of the box like it happens with Kopete in Debian KDE.
At some point I thought it was a problem of server as the default login server you have when adding ICQ account is login.messaging.aol.com. According to http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5450 the server is correct and it should work flawlessly.
Despite the message in the ticket I decided to try login.icq.com instead of login.messaging.aol.com because it is shorter, and it makes perfect sense for me (I have no idea what is aol, and as I am going to use ICQ protocol, it is logical for me to use login.icq.com as an address) and guess what? It works!
Here comes the snapshot settings of my ICQ account in pidgin:
Thanks for this, I thought I had tried every single combination of the options and still got odd errors. Apparently I had to drop SSL and clientLogin, although I don’t know how good idea it is to use any messenger without encryption these days…
Well, if you are desperate, you may always consider compiling pidgin manually from upstream. For sure they have fixed it in upstream version …
Another option would be to temporally enable sid repositories and install pidgin from there and then switch back again to stable. This is explained here: http://www.shcherbyna.com/?p=1524
there is another client, called SIM, it’s bit buggy but it’s wayy better for ICQ under Linux.
but you’d need to compile it from trunk otherwise you will get old version.
It is strange that it is good, but never have been packaged for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint …
p sim – simple instant messenger (KDE)
p sim-data – Sim-IM Instant Messenger data files
p sim-qt – simple instant messenger (Qt)
debian has packages for it, but I do not recommend using them, better compile from the trunk
I don’t know …
I am quite happy with kopete (in KDE) or pidgin (in GNOME). In fact, at work on Windows I also use pidgin mainly because I can combine ICQ + Microsoft Lync protocols in a single client.
Thank you!
Debian Squeeze
pidgin_2.7.3-1+squeeze2_amd64.deb
pidgin_2.7.3-1+squeeze3_amd64.deb
pidgin-data_2.7.3-1+squeeze2_all.deb
pidgin-data_2.7.3-1+squeeze3_all.deb
Worked with the settings:
login.icq.com
port 5190
use ssl unchecked
use clientlogin unchecked
encoding ISO-8859-1
Did not work with
login.messaging.aol.com
slogin.oscar.aol.com