Pidgin From Source Farsight And GstInterfaces

While using Jaunty and having problems with Pidgin 2.5.5 and its MSN protocol error “Connection error from Notification server: Unable to connect”, and also with WLM error “nexus stream error”, I ended up installing 2.10.0 from source. During the installation, I had the following problems to install the sound and video dependencies:

checking for GSTINTERFACES… no
checking for FARSIGHT… no

Ok, for GSTINTERFACES I was not finding easely what package to install. Looking into “configure” file, it was requiring a “gstreamer-interfaces-0.10″ package, but this was not found in Jaunty. So, I figured out that the right package is libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev. Therefore,

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev

For FARSIGHT things were more complicated. I needed to install libnice 0.0.9, and farsight2 0.0.10 (which required lots of denpendencies) both from source.

The result was

checking for GSTINTERFACES… yes
checking for FARSIGHT… yes

and I could finally use Pidgin 2.10.0 with sound and video on Jaunty.

More resources of information regarding Pidgin installation from source can be found here, and here.

Compiz Instead Metacity When Starting Gnome

Suddenly Metacity was being loaded in lieu of Compiz when starting Gnome. I tried restart compiz with:

compiz --replace

but it did not work and Metacity kept itself up and running.

What worked for me was open gconf-editor (Alt+F2 > “gconf-editor” > Enter) and navigate trough “desktop > gnome > session > required_components and set windowmanager key as “compiz”. The next time you start Gnome, Compiz will be loaded.