How To Steam Chat From Pidgin On Fedora 19, 18, 17 And OpenSUSE 13.1, 12.3, 12.2

Hello Linux Geeksters.

In this article I will show you how to use the Steam Chat From Pidgin, on Fedora 19, Fedora 18, Fedora 17, OpenSUSE 13.1, OpenSUSE 12.3 and OpenSUSE 12.2. The plugin needed for integrating Pidgin with the Steam chat is pidgin-opensteamworks.

As you know, Steam on Linux uses a lot of resources and so, using the Steam chat without having the Steam Client opened is an awesome thing for your laptop’s battery and cpu usage.

I have coloured the Fedora commands with purple, the OpenSUSE commads with green and the common commads with red, for a better visibility.

If you don’t have Pidgin already installed just open a terminal and do:

For Fedora:

$ yum install -y pidgin

For OpenSUSE:

$ zypper install pidgin

This library file is required. On Fedora is called json-glin and on OpenSUSE libjson-glib:

Install json-glib on Fedora:

$ yum install json-glib

Install libjson-glib-1_0-0 on OpenSUSE:

$ zypper install libjson-glib-1_0-0

The following instructions are the same, for Fedora and OpenSUSE:

Download libsteam* (pidgin-opensteamworks).

For 32 bit systems:

$ wget -c pidgin-opensteamworks.googlecode.com/files/libsteam-1.1.so

For 64 bit systems:

$ wget -c pidgin-opensteamworks.googlecode.com/files/libsteam64-1.1.so

Next, copy libsteam*.so to /usr/lib/purple-2:

$ sudo cp libsteam*.so /usr/lib/purple-2

Download the icon archive and unzip it to/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols/:

$ wget -c pidgin-opensteamworks.googlecode.com/files/icons.zip
$ unzip icons.zip /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols
$ rm icons.zip

This is it. Now restart Pidgin, select Steam from the Protocol Dropdown list and login with your steam user and password.