Ubuntu – Show buddy when offline

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:

$ sudo apt-get purge pidgin pidgin-libnotify pidgin-data indicator-status-provider-pidgin

Clear stale archives:

$ sudo apt-get clean

Reboot.

Reinstall pidgin alongwith dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install pidgin

This solved the issue for me. Pidgin now shows buddy list from indicator menu and when I launch Pidgin manually.

Devilspie messes things up for me using unity. So I start Pidgin using this simple script:

#!/bin/bash
pidgin &
sleep 6
wmctrl -c "Buddy List"

Sleeping is neccessary so the window does not respawn. It is ugly but the best possible for me. Note that it closes the window but does not quit Pidgin. Minimize and close the window have almost the same meaning for Pidgin.