I use SLF 4.4 on my desktop and came to find out that the only IM software
available in the yum repos is the older gaim software version "who knows how old"

I wanted to use a feature in pidgin, but was convinced that I wouldn't be
able to compile it from scratch due to potential missing or old libraries.

So before I attempted to compile it, I figured I'd take a shot at getting
RPMs to work.

It's possible to get pidgin installed on SLF 4, and it's actually pretty
easy. The hardest part was finding the URLs to download the files from.

Pidgin's website assumes you're using RHEL 4, so the links and instructions
are based on that. See the link below.

	http://www.pidgin.im/download/centos_rhel/

Well, those instructions are great and all, but they don't work because of
some circular dependency error that up2date encounters with sourceforge : (

If you just go to that RHEL 4 URL though, you can see the rpms available

	http://rpm.pidgin.im/rhel/4/$ARCH

For my system in particular, I wanted

	http://rpm.pidgin.im/rhel/4/i386/

Once there, you want to grab the pidgin and libpurple rpms (most recent ones
available). At the time of this writing, the most recent rpms are shown below.

	pidgin-2.3.1-0.el4.i386.rpm
	libpurple-2.3.1-0.el4.i386.rpm

Download them to your system and installed them as root

	rpm -Uvh pidgin-2.3.1-0.el4.i386.rpm libpurple-2.3.1-0.el4.i386.rpm

Once you're done, you should be able to run pidgin. It will also show up in
your application menu.

-Tim