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Vadim Peretokin
Asked: 2013-12-17 13:56:26 +0800 CST

Unable to launch pidgin

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Using pidgin from the command-line or launching it via the indicator is not working. I've tried reinstalling it, but the issue persists:

$ pidgin
The program 'pidgin' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install pidgin
$ sudo apt-get install pidgin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
pidgin is already the newest version.
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

How can this be fixed?

Update: removing pidgin-sipe did not help remove the diversion (see answers below). Doing sudo dpkg-divert --remove /usr/bin/pidgin, and then reinstalling the pidgin package fixed it.

apt

2 Answers

  1. Apparently there's a package diversion that renames /usr/bin/pidgin to /usr/bin/pidgin.orig, for some reason. I can't verify the changelog now (servers are dead) but you may execute pidgin by typing pidgin.orig.

    • 0
  2. Best Answer

    As seen in http://paste.ubuntu.com/6586027/:

    /usr/bin/pidgin
diverted by pidgin-sipe to: /usr/bin/pidgin.orig

    Another package called pidgin-sipe diverted the original /usr/bin/pidgin to /usr/bin/pidgin.orig. I recommend to purge this package by:

    sudo apt-get purge pidgin-sipe

    and then mv pidgin.orig to pidgin:

    sudo mv /usr/bin/pidgin.orig /usr/bin/pidgin
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