I do most of my development work under Linux these days, specifically I'm now running Kubuntu 8.04. One of the many, many distractions I have from useful work is messenger. Most of my friends are on MSN Messenger, and naturally Microsoft don't do a client for Linux. However, the Pidgin (previously known as GAIM) support for MSN is pretty good, and its nice that I can use the same client to talk to people on GMail, Jabber, and the like.

The one thing that Pidgin doesn't do out of the box is "toast" notifications when someone sends me a message. It will play you a noise, and if I have the speakers on that's fine - but it can be antisocial, so I don't like to do this when I'm in the office. Without the bingly noises, it's easy to miss someone's reply to a question or otherwise ignore them until such time as the Pidgin window is exposed for some reason.

Fortunately Pidgin has support for plugins, and there's a plugin that provides libnotify (toast) messages. Yay. It's proven to be a bit of a pain to get running, so here's what I did.

Firstly, install the package:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-libnotify

This adds the libnotify plugin to Pidgin and it will be in the plugins list once you restart. However, if you try to enable it, you'll find that the plugin can't be enabled - you'll get the following error:

libnotify-Message: Unable to get session bus: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session

I don't pretend to understand exactly what's going on here - but the gist is that it doesn't have access to the notification service. To fix that, you need to launch pidgin with dbus-launch:

dbus-launch pidgin

In my case that means adding the dbus-launch prefix to the command entry in my KDE menus. Once this is done, launch Pidgin, go to the plugins menu (Tools -> Plugins) scroll down the list to "Libnotify Popups" and check the box. You can configure popups for various events. I just want it for when people send me new messages - for which it works very nicely.