Although both Ubuntu and Fedora replaced Pidgin with Empathy, the Pidgin developers have been hard at work and has released a new version of Pidgin - Pidgin 2.7.

This version of Pidgin brings  a lot of new features and improvement:

• Added support for IPv6 for Bonjour
• Support sending and receiving HTML-formatted messages for ICQ
• Use the proper URL for "View web profile" link for ICQ buddies
• Support file transfer thumbnails (previews) for images in MSN
• Use G!tkStatusIcon for the docklet, providing better integration in notification area
• Added UI for sending attentions (buzz, nudge) on supporting protocols
• Added a menu set mood globally for all mood-supporting accounts

You can view the complete changelog here.

Currently it is not available in the Pidgin-Developers-PPA for Ubutnu yet. However, you can install it from Andrea Piccinelli's PPA (only Karmic and Lucid). To do it open the terminal and execute the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:frasten/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install pidgin