KDE4, Gnome and Growl for Windows Notifications in Pidgin

This is a notification plugin for Purple/Pidgin that provides notifications through KDialog or libnotify, when:

• a buddy signs on
• a buddy signs off
• a message is received (if the conversation window is not focused).

The purpose of this plugin is to offer a better integration of Pidgin and the KDE 4 desktop. Support for libnotify (Gnome style) is also offered as an alternative.

An experimental version that uses Growl is provided for Windows. See the installation notes below.

Features

• Shows notifications for buddy sign on, sign off and message received events
• It is a Perl plugin -> no compilation is needed, just place it in Pidgin's plugin folder and it works
• Configurable: you can disable/enable each type of notification and set the popup duration

News

Keep yourself updated by subscribing to the RSS changelog feed. Or browse the source code changelog in your browser here.

Linux Requirements

This plugin is designed to work with Pidgin under Linux and KDE4 or Gnome. It is written in Perl, so make sure your version of Pidgin has Perl support; you can find out by going to Pidgin->Help->About and in the Library support section you must see Perl: enabled. If Perl is not enabled then it might be provided by your distribution in a different package, search for something like pidgin-perl.

You will also need Perl and KDE4. As an alternative to KDE, or if you want to use Gnome notifications under KDE, you must install libnotify (the notify-send command is required).

Perl must have support for HTML::Entities; this is usually provided in a package called perl-HTML-Parser.

Linux Installation

From the Downloads page, get the latest version of knotifications.pl and save it to ~/.purple/plugins (create the plugins directory if it does not exist), for example: /home/bob/.purple/plugins/knotifications.pl.

The Chromium browser might save the file with a wrong extension, knotifications.download. Make sure the file extension is correct, it must be pl: knotifications.pl.

You must then go to Pidgin->Tools->Plugins and enable KDE Notifications from the list.

Windows installation

• Install ActivePerl
• Install Growl for Windows
• From the Downloads page, get the latest version of knotifications-win.pl and save it to C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\.purple\plugins (create the plugins directory if it does not exist)
• Open Pidgin, and enable the plugin. From its configuration page, make sure the paths to the Pidgin icon folder and the Growl folder are correct.

Screenshots

Notification when a buddy signs on:

Notification for a new message:

Gnome (libnotify) notification:

Windows (growlnotify) notification:

Configuration page:

User feedback and bugtracker

Please see the user feedback page.