Using OTR with Portable Pidgin

[Etan Reisner]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:35:28PM -0700, Student of Slavers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've only recently begun using Pidgin so I apologize if this is not the correct address for questions. (Still finding my way around the community).
> Anyway, I hope you can help, or refer my question to someone who can answer it.

Welcome, and yes this is a good place to ask questions in general.

<snip>
> This all seems to work fine (I even managed to replicate my existing accounts, buddys, logs, icons, smileys, etc in one foul swoop onto the USB stick by just copying the entire .purple directory across) -- This is not documented t the page mentioned above, but it seems to work.

That is the correct thing to do, how much of .purple you actually needed
depends on what your goal was (whether you need your logs copied for
example depends on whether you log and whether you want them with you or
not).

> NOTE. This also copies a couple of files named otr.private_key and otr.fingerprints (which resided in the .purple folder) onto the memory stick. (Does this constitute a security risk? --- as the folders on the stick are not protected by any sort of user security.)

I don't know enough about the OTR plugin to comment on this, you would
likely be better off attempting to find the OTR people and asking them
directly (I don't know who they are offhand).

> So, anyway...
> The next step was to try and get the OTR plug-in working with the portable memory-stick version, so that when travelling, I can also conduct private conversations from any location where I can plugin the USB stick.
> Unfortunately, the OTR plug-in seems to require a proper installation of Pidgin, as when I try and install it to E:\portable\pidgin-otr it complains that it cannot detect a Pidgin installation.
> I understand that the portable version on the Memory Stick is not a "full" installation, but I was wondering if there's some way to get OTR working in this situation with the portable version?

This sounds like a bug-let in the OTR installer to me, I can't imagine it
needs much more than to install a couple files in the correct places for
pidgin (which places it probably can't detect automatically with a
portable installation, but which it could allow you to specify I imagine).
So again I think your best bet would be to contact the OTR plugin authors
directly.

> As I said, I'm still finding my way around so I apologize if this question's already been asked on some forum sometime in the past.
> I'd appreciate any advice.
>
> Regards
> Phil
> .

    -Etan