Pidgin won't start (completely)

[Christian Baer]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 22:32 -0400, Nathan Walp wrote:

Hi there!
And thank you for you post!

>> After a while [ a few hours :-) ] the computer was done.
>> Starting Pidgin from KDE resulted in it being shown in the task bar at the
>> bottom for about 20 seconds and after that it just disappears. It could
>> however still be found with "ps ax". So I decided to start it from the
>> console. It started and kept running, just no window ever appeared for it.
>> ctrl-c did terminate it.
> 
> Sounds like it is starting fine, and is minimized into the system 
> tray/notification area/whatever KDE calls it (dock, maybe?).

You had me going there for a moment, because I thought I had actually been
to blind to see that. And even though it wouldn't have been good for my
ego, a "user to dumb error" that solves the problem is fine with me. :-)

In this case, unfortunately, no...

I was a little unclear in my original discription. I just resort to the
Windows terms for now and I hope the KDE people won't be offended!

When I start Pidgin from KDE (it was automatically added to the Kicker
menu), it appears in the task bar with the right icon and has the note
"loading application". The cursor has a little jumping pidgin head and the
bar in the task bar has the usual hour glass. After those disappear, there
is no icon in what Windows calls the tray or system tray (bottom right).
It just looks as if pidgin has been terminated again.

When I try to start pidgin from the console, I do so without starting KDE
or anything else. There isn't even a wm running on that machine.

I should point out that I access this machine only over the network[1] - it
doesn't actually have a monitor or keyboard connected. The Xserver I am
currently using is Xming (Windows). Xming can start fullscreen sessions
(like when you start KDE) or single (multiple) Windows. In the latter case
is acts like the Xserver and wm. In the former case the wm on the client
is used.

This constellation works fine so far. I can run all of KDE or single apps
without KDE (like the konqueror). Even xmms works fine - including sound
and the OpenGL visualisation, although that's a little bumpy over the
network. :-)

The only thing I can't get running is pidgin. Because of the last message
I see when starting it with -d, I am guessing that it could be a router
problem - I consider UPnP to be evil and therefore it is off. A friend of
mine however also uses Pidgin (under Windows) behind a simmilar router
without any problems.

Are there any more Ideas where I should poke around?

Regards
Chris

[1] This Sun U60 was not much more than a door-stop because we (my family)
had already had faster machines. But it seemed a bit of a waste to just
leave it standing around, as it was *very* expensive when we bought it and
the 2GB of RAM together with the 2 74GB Cheetahs it has are quite ok even
by today's standards.
I switch operating systems, depending on what I want to do. I have both
WinXP and FreeBSD installed on my main machine and boot the OS I need.
This has the disadvantage that I'd have to maintain certain software
twice. So I installed the software that I would be using double on the Sun
and accessed it over the network. This also gave rise to the opportunity
to let other people in my family access the software in this machine. This
way I only have to keep one copy of Pidgin (and any other software on this
machine) up to date.