Installing smartear on Ubuntu Jaunty

First apt-get remove pidgin. Don't do any autoremoving, you might need some of those devel packages later on. Next, hop on over to pidgin's and smartear's sites and download source tarballs.

Extract both tarballs, you will then need to compile pidgin from source. I did have to disable video and voice capabilites, that's fine for me. But if you want them you will need to find the correct libraries.

# apt-get -y remove pidgin
# apt-get -y build-dep pidgin
# ./configure --disable-vv
# make install

Now it's time to get into that SmartEar tarball. If you check out the INSTALL file you will see that you need to edit the Makefile and change the PIDGIN_SRCDIR to whatever directory you compiled pidgin in. So:

PIDGIN_SRCDIR=../whatever_directory_you_untared_to/pidgin

Then just run make install:

# make install

Done!