SysAdmin Adventures

This is a simple one.

Pidgin uses GStreamer for producing sound (don’t ask me why.. I think it’s a bit daft too). GStreamer relies on plugins for pretty much all sound formats.

GStreamer plugins come in three categories:

• gst-plugins-good (high-quality LGPL plugins)
• gst-plugins-bad (reasonable-quality plugins with free distribution licences)
• gst-plugins-ugly (good-quality plugins that have licence/distribution issues)

Pidgin’s default sound scheme uses WAV files and therefore needs the GStreamer WAV plugin which is available in gst-plugins-good. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever why Slackware 13.0 ships with GStreamer but without gst-plugins-good, however this is not a problem because SlackBuilds.org solves everything:

(you do use sbopkg don’t you?)