How to Install Gfire Plugin on Crunchbang Linux

Written on: 03 Sep 2013

After reinstalling Windows 8 after it probably automatically installed something via Windows update that resulted in black screens, I found out that it also somehow marked my Crunchbang root partition unallocated.

So after reinstalling Crunchbang, I realized that there isn’t a good guide to installing the Gfire plugin on Crunchbang/Debian since there are some dependency issues.

So here’s a quick guide to compiling gfire for Wheezy:

The first symptom is that the .deb of gfire complains that you do not have a version of libnotify1 installed.

In Crunchbang Waldorf/Debian Wheezy, you might notice that libnotify1 doesn’t exist; you have libnotify4 installed.

Download the source from sourceforge
Unzip the tar.bz2 with tar xjf pidgin-gfire-0.9.4.tar.bz2
Change directories to the unzipped files
Run ./configure and see the output. If you are on a clean install, then here’s what you might encounter.
You are missing pkg-config, so install it: apt-get install pkg-config
You are missing Purple, so install the library apt-get install libpurple-dev
You are missing intltool, install it apt-get install intltool
If configure complains that libpurple was not found after installing it, use ./configure --prefix=/usr
Hopefully, configure finally finishes without errors now, so run ./make
Finish the installation with make install

Now, when you fire up Pidgin, you should have the Gfire plugin installed!