Gaim (now renamed to Pidgin, but the version I’m using isn’t that
new) comes with a “guifications” plugin to do “notifications”, those
little popup “toast” messages to tell you that someone’s messaged you,
someone’s logged on or off, all that sort of thing. However,
guifications is ugly and doesn’t look like the rest of my desktop, and
there is a proper notification thing for Linux, called libnotify. Some
bright spark has written a Gaim plugin to use libnotify for
notifications, but it’s not available in Ubuntu edgy. It is, however, in
the development release, Ubuntu feisty. Here’s how to install it (and
this acts as a very tiny HOWTO for how to install stuff from an Ubuntu
release other than the one you’re on). Basically, this involves building
the package from the source code. First, then, you have to tell Ubuntu
that it can get source code from Ubuntu feisty. Go 
System >
Administration > Software Sources. In the Third Party tab, click
Add, and put in the APT line: textbox:
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main universe
Add Source, Close, and Reload when it tells you that the
information about available software is out of date. 
Next,
you need to get the Gaim libnotify package. I’m assuming here that
you’ve built packages before; if not, you’ll need to install
build-essential from Synaptic (or with
sudo aptitude install build-essential in a terminal). Create a
temporary folder to do the build in (Places > Home Folder,
then right-click in your home folder window and say Create Folder,
and call the new folder tmp). In a terminal (Applications >
Accessories > Terminal), change into your created temporary folder
cd tmp
and install first the things you need to build the package
sudo aptitude install libnotify-dev gaim-dev fakeroot cdbs
(you could also install those three packages from Synaptic if you prefer), and then fetch and automatically build the gaim libnotify package
fakeroot apt-get --build source gaim-libnotify
That will take a little while. Once it’s finished, go back to your Home
Folder window and look in the tmp temporary folder you created. There
should be a file called gaim-libnotify_0.12-1_i386.deb 
Run that
file. The Package Installer window will pop up; click Install
Package. This will install the new notifications (it may ask for your
password to do the installation). Now, you need to enable the plugin. If
Gaim isn’t running, run it (Applications > Internet > Gaim
Internet Messenger), and right-click on its notification-area icon;
choose Plugins: 
In the Plugins window, tick Libnotify
popups. Remember to untick Guifications if you were using it
before! Close the Plugins window. I then had to quit Gaim (right-click
the notification-area icon, Quit) and restart it before the new
notifications worked properly. But, lo and behold, nice pretty
notifications when someone logs in! 
