Fix for “Pidgin not connecting to Yahoo on Lenny”

For last few weeks Pidgin(from lenny stable repo) was failing to enable my Yahoo account. I tried reading up on the internet and changing hostname etc, but none of that worked. Upgrade to pidgin/testing or unstable looked like too disruptive and could have made my installation unstable. So i decided to compile it from source, which worked, but with a few quirks. So here is what you need to do:
Get the source from http://www.pidgin.im/download/source/

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$ sudo apt-get build-dep pidgin
$ sudo apt-get install network-manager-dev
$ tar -jxvf pidgin-2.5.8.tar.bz2 #extract source from downloaded archive
$ sudo mv pidgin-2.5.8 /usr/local/ #hack: when you 'make install' pidgin it doesn't work(reports some smiley missing or something), so we will invoke it directly from the built-source directory
$ cd /usr/local/pidgin-2.5.8
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ pidgin # and watch it fail, with some file missing problem
$ sudo chown -R root:root . # as we are going to use this as install location
$ /usr/local/pidgin-2.5.8/pidgin/pidgin #execute pidgin, add your account, and watch it connect to Yahoo


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The same executable can be added to session preferences to start pidgin on session load.