Error Installing Pidgin 2.7.0 on Windows

On May 13, 2010, by Corey DeGrandchamp
Posted in Guides, Technology

The latest release of Pidgin (2.7.0) has a borked installer on Windows, it fails to download the (now required) updated to GTK+, and causes issues making it not launch.

My initial reaction to this was to find the latest version of GTK+ and install it, however the official packages from the GTK website were just .zip files, and extracting them were I felt they would work, yeilded the same results.

There’s a quick fix to this issue though, and it’s to download Pidgin’s offline installer, located:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/2.7.0/pidgin-2.7.0-offline.exe/download

That should fix the issue right away.

Just for reference these are the errors you’d encounter during the online/live installer.

Error Downloading the GTK+ Runtime : http://pidgin.im/win32/download_redir.php?version=2.7.0&gtk_version=2.16.6.0&dl_pkg=gtk

While installing, and then the two following after the install “completes”.

The program can’t start because libatk-1.0-0.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

and

Error loading pidgin.dll. Error: (126) The specified module could not be found.

This probably means that GTK+ can’t be found.

Tagged with: GTK+ • Pidgin

16 Responses to “Error Installing Pidgin 2.7.0 on Windows”

Soffort says:

May 14, 2010 at 5:24 PM

Thanx, dude! Very helpful!

[Reply]
Corey DeGrandchamp Reply:
May 15th, 2010 at 2:20 PM
@Soffort, no problem, glad I could help.

[Reply]
guu says:

May 18, 2010 at 1:25 PM

thanks

[Reply]
Ap says:

May 21, 2010 at 10:17 AM

thanks, helped a lot.

[Reply]
Lewis says:

May 23, 2010 at 5:39 AM

Thanks I tried installing it like 5 times before finding this

[Reply]
Sarah says:

May 24, 2010 at 12:04 PM

Thanks! I also noted that it gave a URL for the GTK download in the Pidgin installer, which redirected to http://softlayer.dl.sourceforge.net/project/pidgin/GTK%2B%20for%20Windows/2.16.6.0/gtk-runtime-2.16.6.0.zip The problem was then figuring out where to extract this GTK ZIP, so I’m just going to use the installer you linked.

[Reply]
anonnnn says:

May 26, 2010 at 1:40 PM

This worked~!

[Reply]
Fadi Mansour says:

June 3, 2010 at 4:48 AM

You can just extract the GTK archive into the installation directory of Pidgin (under a GTK folder), and Pidgin will run.

This is from:

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin#WhatisagtkrcfileandwherecanIfindit

[Reply]
Andrey says:

June 6, 2010 at 2:24 PM

THANKS it fixed my problem!

[Reply]
Jakub says:

June 23, 2010 at 9:24 AM

thanks, it helped

[Reply]
Vaibhav Gupta says:

August 20, 2010 at 5:15 AM

thx! gr8 help…

[Reply]
Achshar says:

November 25, 2010 at 12:29 PM

cool the offline installer works just fine

[Reply]
marshal maskarenj says:

March 25, 2011 at 6:07 AM

Thanks a lot!

[Reply]
Mona says:

October 30, 2011 at 6:43 PM

Hi

i could make the solution out yet m on win 7 n wanna know ho has blocked me on thier gtalk n for that i wanna install pidgin so all the time error coming help plzzzzzzz

[Reply]
Corey Reply:
October 31st, 2011 at 7:54 AM
@Mona, This post isn’t making alot of sense…

For one, this is an old version of Pidgin, just download the latest from http://www.pidgin.im, it shouldn’t give you any errors, if it does you’ll have to Google them specifically.

Second, Pidgin won’t tell you who blocked you on GTalk?

[Reply]
yuvraj says:

November 4, 2011 at 5:48 AM

IT’S WORKS
thank you very much

[Reply]