Pidgin 2.6 is here and it now has the most awaited features – Voice and Video. For those who  are still thinking what pidgin is, it is by far the best cross-platform Instant Messaging client. Pidgin 2.6 supports Voice and Video chat along with SMS, Themes and peer-to-peer file transfer. Unfortunately,the Voice and Video on Pidgin is available only for Linux systems as of now. And now we will tell you how to go about installing Pidgin 2.6 on a Fedora Linux system.

Since this release of Pidgin is very new, you will not be able to get Pidgin on Fedora from the default repos. You will have to download it from alternate locations. The down part is this repo supports only upto Fedora Core 7. For Fedora systems beyond this (fedora 10, Fedora 11), the new Pidgin will be incorporated in the next successive update. Follow the steps below to set-up Pidgin on your system.

Installing on Fedora 10, Fedora 11, Fedora 12

The new Pidgin 2.6 is now available in the repositories of Fedora Linux 10 and Fedora Linux 11. So all of you using these two versions of Fedora  can get the all new Pidgin by using this command:

Installing on systems running Fedora Core 8 and below

1. Install the Pidgin repositories on your Fedora system using this command:

2. Now run an update on your system to grab the newly installed repositories.

3. Now you can install Pidgin by using this command:

You might also like to read about installing Pidgin on Ubuntu and CentOS / RedHat Linux.