The Mystic Bird

Go figure. I’m baffled on this one as I really don’t have a clue at this point just what happened. Pidgin was running along just fine on my Gutsy Gibbon desktop (Ubuntu 7.10)…no problems. I exited from the app because I had to reboot the machine for a download I’d made.

This is where things get fuzzy. After the machine re-booted, I checked for the program I’d downloaded and made sure it was operational. That part went as expected. Next, after clicking on Pidgin on the Taskbar where I had parked the icon earlier…nothing happens. Pidgin never loaded. I tried it several more times…each time giving the app plenty of time to load up. Still nada.

Time to backup and punt here. I uninstalled the entire app via synaptic, rebooted (yeah, I know I didn’t have to) the machine and reinstalled it. Still nothing.

While I’m researching the cause of this problem, I installed Kopete and have it running to keep up with friends and conspirators alike.

Anyone have something similar happen with Pidgin? This is a puzzler.

Update:

Got Pidgin working again and the solution was as nutty as the problem. Seems that the app was running on my desktop but it was hidden for some unknown reason. I found this out by accident when searching for a system process that I was trying to locate.

It was here that I stumbled across the running process for Pidgen. I thought I had lost my mind because the app was removed from usability in the Edit Menus section while I was using Kopete. The darn thing must have been running all along and I just didn’t realize it. That’s what I get for using a Windows mentality approach.

This is why: In Windows one can load up several instances of a program or application. Apparently in Ubuntu, this is not necessarily true. Where I had attempted to load up Pidgin it was already running and therefore didn’t load up twice.

Yeah, I know this doesn’t make any sense really but it’s running again and the next time I run into a similar scenario I’m gonna check the System Processes first before anything else.

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There’s a lot of IM (instant message) clients out there that will bring you in contact with friends, family and co-workers in real time. They allow file transfers, image transfers, ongoing conversations and loads of other interesting things that we learn to depend on over time.

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