Lubomir Petrik's Weblog

Well, seems like ICQ banned many clients with old protocol version including Pidgin 2.4.1 in my OpenSUSE 11. Here's a fix that might work for you (until there's new Pidgin version in the repository with the real fix).

Use at own risk!

• Make a backup of the ICQ library:

32-bit Pidgin:
cp /usr/lib/purple-2/liboscar.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib/purple-2/liboscar.so.0.0.0.bak

64-bit Pidgin:
cp /usr/lib64/purple-2/liboscar.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib64/purple-2/liboscar.so.0.0.0.bak

• Install some HexEditor (e.g.: ghex)
• Exit Pidgin if it's running
  
• Start the HexEditor as root and open liboscar.so.0.0.0
• Search for 0A 01 66 C7 (only 1 occurrence should be found)
• Replace the 0A by 0B and save the file
• Start Pidgin and reconnect to ICQ, should be working again
• If it worked, remove the .bak file. If not, stop Pidgin, replace library with the .bak file and you're back where you started
  

New OpenSUSE version is out since June 19th. This time in version 11. I've tried the Gnome version in my VirtualBox.

Things I noticed the most compared to 10.3

• major improvement to package management (updater startup in 10.3 took several minutes, in 11 it' down to several seconds!)
• gnome 2.22 (OpenSolaris 2008.05 uses 2.20)
• firefox 3 (really great improvement to version 2, highly recommended to try!)

Things I don't like

• PulseAudio (while I didn't have any audio issues with 10.3, I do have in 11)

For more information see the OpenSUSE 11  GM annoucement.