As of today I suddenly wasn’t able to connect to MSN anymore with Pidgin under my Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). After googling I found, that msnp14 doesn’t seem to work anymore and one has to switch to msnp15 which is included with the package msn-pecan. So here’s how this works on Ubuntu 8.10:

- Stop all Pidgin instances
- Go to your favourite package manager (I use command line apt-get) and install msn-pecan
- apt-get install msn-pecan
- start pidgin and go to the account settings for your MSN account. Set the protocol from “MSN” to “WLM”

After those steps, msn should work again with pidgin.
I also strongly recommend to frequently change your MSN passwords! In the last few weeks I get more and more SPAM messages from friends which I have in my MSN list. I guess their passwords leaked somehow and some nasty script is spamming me through their accounts.

Use this address to change your MSN password: https://account.live.com/

Cheers and have a nice week