Tag Archives: pidgin

Quick/Dirty Yahoo Fix for Carrier 2.5.5

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So, lots of people using third-party IM clients noticed last week that their Yahoo connectivity broke.  This is because Yahoo discontinued older versions of their client protocol, and this broke a lot of third-party apps that used those versions of the protocol, notably multi-IM apps.  Pidgin and Carrier (a branch of Pidgin) are notable examples of cross-platform open source multi-protocol IM apps that were broken with this.

I’ve personally gotten spoiled and lazy from Carrier (and Trillian before that), having one app that I can use for most of the IM services I use all together, not having to hassle with multiple seperate clients (though occasionally I’ve loaded up a distinct client for specific features that Carrier doesn’t support – but for just general, chatting with people, having 1 app to use is nice).  Having one of the core points of functionality broken on Carrier has been an irritant for me the last several days.

Pidgin already released a 2.5.7 upgrade, which fixes the Yahoo issues.  Carrier has a 2.5.7 release in work on the SVN, but for most people, trying to checkout/download files from the SVN, get all the stuff together to compile the code yourself, build the installer, etc., is just way too much work.  There’ll probably be a new installer for Windows out for Carrier 2.5.7 sometime this week.

Until then, if you happen to use Carrier and want to fix your Yahoo . . . there’s a pretty simple fix – you can snag the new libyahoo.dll from Pidgin 2.5.7 and overwrite the one in Carrier 2.5.5, and it seems to restore Yahoo functionality.  Here’s a download for just the libyahoo.dll, zipped up for easy management (since you can’t easily install Pidgin to get it out without messing up your Carrier install): libyahoo.zip

Unzip the libyahoo.dll and overwrite your current one (the new one Will be smaller than the one in Carrier 2.5.5), in your Carrier/plugins/ folder – make sure Carrier isn’t running when you do that.  Start up Carrier, and you should connect to Yahoo again.

How to Fix Your Carrier 2.5.4 ICQ “Old Version – Upgrade” Issue

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So, a couple of days ago, AOL started blocking older versions of the ICQ protocol.  I noticed this yesterday when my Carrier (the multi-IM client formerly known as FunPidgin, a branch of Pidgin) started telling me I was using too old of a version of my client, to please upgrade.  Now, all things said, this is kind of a minor thing . . .  I so rarely ever communicate via ICQ with anyone anymore, but I’ve had an ICQ number longer than any other IM identity, and what’s important, dammit, is that the potential for communication via ICQ is there.

I was still running Carrier 2.5.0, and I discovered today that 2.5.4 was available.  I upgraded, hoping that would fix it.  Nope.  I searched in vain online for information on this, news, fixes, newer code from a repository – something.  I found a slashdot article about the ICQ version change thing, which talked about a lot of IM client which I don’t use, and Pidgin’s site says that some folks in some areas were having issues with ICQ, and to just upgrade to 2.5.5, and that pretty much fixed it.

So, after some experimentation and fiddling around, if you want to fix your Carrier 2.5.4 to work with ICQ again . . . simply get the Pidgin 2.5.5 client, install it somewhere (another machine or something – I used a virtual machine, thank you VMWare) where it won’t muck with your main Carrier install, and them simply grab the liboscar.dll from the new Pidgin 2.5.5 install and replace the liboscar.dll in your Carrier install with it.  Start up Carrier and re-enable ICQ, and things should be fine again.