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Contents

  1. Supported Protocols
    1. Not directly supported protocols
    2. Note on installing
  2. Protocol Troubleshooting
    1. Yahoo
    2. MSN
    3. ICQ
      1. “Empathy can't connect to ICQ, saying only ‘Network Error’.”

Supported Protocols

For protocols not supported by Empathy out-of-the-box you need to install an appropriate connection manager (protocol backend).

  • AIM: install telepathy-haze

  • Google Hangouts, Jabber, XMPP: install telepathy-gabble

  • local network ("Bonjour" - iChat-compatible): install telepathy-salut

  • ICQ: install telepathy-haze

  • IRC: install telepathy-idle (see the FAQ for more notes on IRC)

  • MSN: install telepathy-butterfly

  • SIP: install telepathy-rakia (known as telepathy-sofiasip before version 0.7.2), and the account-plugin-sip (see the FAQ for more notes on SIP)

  • Yahoo!: install telepathy-haze

Not directly supported protocols

  • Facebook (dropped their chat for 3rd party apps; reverse engineering work is in progress: see purple-facebook on Github)

Various protocols supported by libpurple should theoretically work if you install telepathy-haze, but might not be very well-tested. These protocols include:

  • Gadu-Gadu
  • Groupwise
  • Myspace
  • Sametime
  • SILC
  • Zephyr

Note on installing

Until some D-Bus bugs have been fixed, you might need to log out and log back in to be able to create accounts using a newly installed connection manager.

We plan to integrate packagekit to install missing package, help is welcome on bug #518429

Protocol Troubleshooting

Here are some known issues you might have with specific protocols, with fixes and workarounds.

If you're having a problem not listed here, do not add it to this page. Instead, file a bug or ask in the Empathy chat room (#empathy on irc.gnome.org; irc://irc.gnome.org/empathy).

Yahoo

Problem: I can't add a Yahoo account in the Accounts window (e.g. it's not in the list of protocols).

Solution: Make sure telepathy-haze is installed on your system. On Ubuntu you need to run the following at a terminal:

  •  sudo apt-get install telepathy-haze 

Problem: Yahoo icon blinks constantly while trying to connect but never connects.

Possible Solutions:

  • DNS Problem: Change the yahoo server under Edit->Accounts->"My Yahoo Account"->Advanced from scs.msg.yahoo.com to 66.163.181.189

  • Character Encoding: Change the Charset under Edit->Accounts->"My Yahoo Account"->Advanced from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

  • Firewall: Make sure your firewall is open to port 5050. If you can't use this port, try port 80 by changing as described above

Problem: Can add a Yahoo account but get a network error connecting (proxy server active)

Solution: As Yahoo uses port 5050, this port has to be able to get through. If your internet connection is via a proxy server the proxy server has to allow a port 5050 tunnel.

  • In squid proxy, by default the group of SSL_ports are allowed to be tunnelled. A few ports are predefined. You can add port 5050 to these ports by adding the line
    • 'acl SSL_ports port 5050 # Empathy - Yahoo connection'
  • Add the above line at the bottom of the other 'acl SSL_ports ...' lines. Everything after the '#' is a comment only
  • Restart the squid proxy
  • One last thing, if you don't control your proxy server, for example you use a company proxy server, you would have to ask the administrator to enable port 5050 tunnelling.

MSN

Problem: Error message "Network Error"

Possible Solution:

  • Kill the running process called telepathy-butterfly and reconnect the account by unchecking and re-checking the box under Edit->Accounts. For example:

  •  killall telepathy-butterfly 

ICQ

“Empathy can't connect to ICQ, saying only ‘Network Error’.”

As of 18th November 2010, there's an issue which can be worked around by disabling SSL during ICQ login. Unfortunately, Empathy does not currently offer a way to do this, so you'll have to use the command line to change this option.

  • Disable your ICQ account.

  • In a terminal, run the following command: mc-tool update haze/icq/_3<your uin>0 bool:use-ssl=false

    • The extra '3' and '0' are deliberate!

    • For instance, if your ICQ username is '12345', run: mc-tool update haze/icq/_3123450 bool:use-ssl=false

    • If you get an unhelpful error telling you that ‘Method "GetAll" with signature "s" on interface "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" doesn't exist’ then use mc-tool list | grep icq to check what the identifier for your account is.

  • Re-enable your ICQ account.

If this doesn't work, disable your ICQ account, wait 10 minutes, and try again.

A future release of the ICQ backend will improve the error reporting for this situation, and fix a bug which might cause your account to be locked for 10 minutes when this happens.

Attic/Empathy/Protocols (last edited 2021-05-25 17:48:04 by MichaelCatanzaro)