I like to use pidgin instead of Empathy because I'm used to it, and because I have to venture into windows for more development than I would prefer.
In Ubuntu 11.10, I can't find any way to get to the buddy list. It opens, and just sits there in the messenger panel tray thing. From its previous behavior, I believe Pidgin usually starts up minimized– you have to click on its system tray to show the buddy list. The messenger applet does not seem to support this functionality. Is this a bug, or am I just missing something obvious?
Best Answer
Faced the same problem. Completely reinstalling (purge and reinstall) pidgin and it's dependencies solved it for me. Try the following in a terminal.
Purge pidgin and its dependencies:
Clear stale archives:
Reboot.
Reinstall pidgin alongwith dependencies:
This solved the issue for me. Pidgin now shows buddy list from indicator menu and when I launch Pidgin manually.