Pidgin OpenSteamWorks is a plugin that allows you to chat with your Steam friends from Pidgin.

Why use it? Well, if you're both a Steam and Pidgin user, you may find it more convenient to chat with your Steam friends from Pidgin, without having to open Steam, especially since the Steam Linux client is very resource hungry.

The plugin has initially used Open Steamworks, an open implementation of Valve's Steamworks API but that required Steam to run in the background so with version 1.0, the plugin has switched to the Steam mobile API so it's no longer needs Steam to work.



The Steam plugin for Pidgin plugin is available for Linux and Mac OSX and there's also an older version available for Windows (however, the old Windows version requires Steam to run in the background).

How to install and use Pidgin OpenSteamWorks plugin

Note: the instructions below are for Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint and derivatives however, they should work on other Linux distributions as well, with a minor modification: skip the "apt install" parts and instead, install wget, unzip and libjson-glib using your distro's package manager.





sudo apt install wget libjson-glib-1.0-0 cd /tmp wget https://github.com/EionRobb/pidgin-opensteamworks/releases/download/1.6.1/libsteam64-1.6.1.so sudo cp libsteam-1.6.1.so /usr/lib/purple-2/

sudo apt install wget libjson-glib-1.0-0 cd /tmp wget https://github.com/EionRobb/pidgin-opensteamworks/releases/download/1.6.1/libsteam64-1.6.1.so sudo cp libsteam64-1.6.1.so /usr/lib/purple-2/

sudo apt install unzip cd /tmp wget https://github.com/EionRobb/pidgin-opensteamworks/raw/master/steam-mobile/releases/icons.zip sudo unzip icons.zip -d /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols/

For Fedora and Windows installation instructions, see the Pidgin OpenSteamWorks plugin GitHub page.





Once installed, restart Pidgin, from its menu select Accounts > Manage Accounts, then click Add and under Protocol select "Steam" and add your username and password, etc.:

Once you click "Add", you should receive an email from Steam Support with a code you need to enter in Pidgin to authorize it to connect with Steam:

Enter the correct code, click OK and that's it. You should now be able to chat with your Steam friends from Pidgin.

seen on onli-blogging.de