Tech Jawa > Guides

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.

I recently started having this issue, and aparrently I’m not alone as others are also complaining of this issue. Some have reported it to be update KB980408, but that uninstalling it won’t fix the issue? I cannot confirm or deny this, as there’s a registry patch/fix instead.

For reference, this is the error in question (when trying to rename a folder).

And here are some hotfix registry patches to apply to fix the issue. I’m sure Microsoft will get enough complaints about this to fix the issue, but in the meantime this should do the trick. As always, use this at your own risk, and don’t touch it if you’re unaware of what the registry is.

FolderFix – Includes both x64 and x86 versions, and should work on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Sikuli Script is an amazing way to script GUI based actions. The script you write is based almost entirely on screenshots (with obviousy text commands to click, doubleclick, and things like that).

The real downfall here, is that Sikuli was seemingly designed from the ground up for OS X 10.5 and 10.6 (Leopard and Snow Leopard). The Windows version works great, however if you install it on a 64-bit version of Windows, it wont even run, you get nothing. To fix this we need to go to the batch file which runs Sikuli, usually located in

C:\Program Files\Sikuli\Sikuli-IDE.bat

You will need to change it to look like this.

@echo off
PATH=%PATH%;%~d0%~p0\tmplib
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe” -Dpython.path=”%~d0%~p0\sikuli-ide-full.jar\Lib” -cp “%~d0%~p0\sikuli-ide-full.jar” edu.mit.csail.uid.SikuliIDE %*

Save it and now just run that .bat file instead of the .exe, as the .exe file still wont work to launch the Sikuli GUI.

The only real downfall to this method is .skl files wont launch unless you set them to launch with the .bat file you just edited. After you do that, they run just fine (with a java window that pops up and closes when it’s finished the script).