How do I get Ubuntu's Pidgin back ?

Pidgin is no longer installed, now I can't even re-install it @ all now.

Has sought a solution not finding, I don't know what is screwed up or how to fix it.

I want to put 2.5.8 back I don't know how.

Hi

Please get to a command-line
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal#Starting%20a%20Terminal
and type in

apt-get --help

to see what you can do with apt-get. Now from there it looks as though a few things are worth trying such as

sudo apt-get check

sudo apt-get install pidgin

I hope this helps a bit!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

OK did all that, I have 2.6.1 again & it behaves same way, starts & crashes. I can't find anyway to go back to previous version now.

& this is still not the Ubuntu Pidgin either I deleted the getdeb & tried to delete the developer repository & that 1 remains still.

This is aggravating they update it & it is broken & the user can't figure out how to get it working now, great..................

mv ~/.purple ~/.purple_old

I experimented with above comand again, the resuls seem to have deleted my accounts.

Pidgin 2.6.1 is now running not crashing & only recall 3 out of 5 accounts I have to get my ICQ & Jabber accounts back later.

YAY !!!!

Pidgin is behaving as it should now ! runs fine it seems, I don't know what happened to it.

That was very aggravating no-less that it was dead for a week.

Anyway I want to Thank you ever so much for helping me. Is happy again I can chat with-out having to resort to YOONO you know.

THANK YOU !
THANK YOU !
THANK YOU !

THANK YOU !

Please look at ActionParsnips comment again and click the button at the bottom of his post. That should help guide people to the right answer when they look in the "Solved Answers" database for how to fix this.

Note that while "the results seem to have deleted my accounts." it hasn't - You have carefully moved the data&settings about those accounts into a new folder called

~/.purple_old

now if you can work out which parts affect the accounts then you can probably copy just a couple of individual files, probably just text-files, and perhaps a folder back into the right place. You can even try this by trial and error - ie keep copying files back into "~/.purple" until pidgin falls over again and then remove whatever file did that. The relevant text-files are probably given scary names like pidgin.conf but just right-click and open with gedit or something to see what's inside.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks actionparsnip, that solved my question.

OK, will try it then.

What did happen to cause this anyway ?

Hi :)

Thanks for marking AP's answer there :)

I don't really have enough experience with gnu&linux to say what caused the problem. For me this sort of problem is usually caused by my incessant need to tweak things until they break. Occasionally a program's update might lead to a regression or might lead to you running an unusual combination of programs on your machine but the next update usually quickly solves rare events like that. Sometimes you do have to post a bug-report just in case the developer hasn't realised something was wrong. Usually that sort of thing gets ironed out in beta testing though - which is one reason why beta testing can be such fun but also is good for the wider linux community.

Also cosmic rays sometimes affect hard-drives and machines, occasionally changing the 1's and 0's stored electromagnetically. Almost anything tends to fix such problems, updates definitely would, a reinstall would be an extreme way of fixing it. "Fix Broken Packages" would solve strange random unlikely things too. I tend to use "recovery mode" about once every couple of months to tidy up any lurking issues.

In Windows i would have put malware at the top of the list of possible things for corrupting a file but in linux it's much more likely to have been caused by cosmic rays (and yes that is incredibly rare too)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)