I got bored over the weekend and did a fresh install of Jaunty. In part I wanted to try out backing up and restoring application settings and other data. It worked out pretty well. I last used Kopete in 2006 and I was a little curious so I installed and fired it up. Adding a Yahoo messenger account worked flawlessly but Google Talk choked on some weird ssl error. As it turned out after some googling, one needs a package called qca-tls (ubuntu) to be able to get Kopete to play nice with Google Talk. Other distributions have slightly different names for this package:

Gentoo                 app-crypt/qca-tls
Mandriva              libqca1-tls
OpenSuSE            qca

On Ubuntu, a quick

sudo aptitude install qca-tls

on the terminal will do the trick. Or you can search for qca-tls in Synaptic.

To add a google talk account:

• Settings –> Configure
• Accounts –> Add Account
• Select Jabber
• Next
• On the Basic Setup tab, your account information should look like this:

Jabber ID:     xxxx@gmail.com (your gmail address)
[ ] Remember password     (Ticking this makes it easier to login later)
Password:     xxxxx (Enter your password)

• The Connection tab should look like this:

[X] Use protocol encryption (SSL)
[X] Allow plain-text password authentication
[X] Override default server information
Server:  [talk.google.com] Port:  [5223]

You’re done.