“Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book” on Pidgin on Ubuntu / Debian?

Today I got the following error on Pidgin (I’m running version 2.5.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) while it tried to connect to MSN: “Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book” After searching a bit I found this post by Gijs Nelissen which said to use a different MSN plugin for Pidgin called msn-pecan. I’ll reiterate the instructions for those with Ubuntu / Debian: Close Pidgin (make sure the process is really down) Run “apt-get install msn-pecan” Start pidgin Change your MSN account type from MSN to WLM Reconnect I don’t know if this error affects other libpurple based multi-headed IMs (such as Adium) (UPDATE: It appears this IS a libpurple issue – so Adium IS affected), however, the msn-pecan project has a Windows binary release as well as source release (if you care/need/want to compile it for Mac OS X or other Linux distributions). [Read More]