I was trying to use Gaim through a proxy on my trusty SuSE 10.1 laptop and noticed that all of the proxy settings were missing from the Gaim interface. I assumed this meant that the suse team were trying to make it “easier” by using the system proxy settings instead.

I found three problems with this. First, I’m currently running KDE and Gaim doesn’t seem to recognize the KDE proxy settings. Second, when I ran gnome-network-preferences and changed the proxy settings there, Gaim would recognize that it was supposed to use a proxy but it failed anyway (not sure why). And finally, what I really want is to only use a proxy for this one app, not the whole system (I have my reasons.. >:/)!

Kopete is actually pretty nice, but it doesn’t have the OTR plugin and I need the encryption. So I downloaded the source RPM for gaim, extracted it using rpm2cpio and started looking into the matter. I found a patch called gaim-gconf-proxy-settings.diff which I was able to remove it from the RPM build process (after editing a few of the other patches that I had now broken).

I built the new Gaim packages, upgraded my default suse package, and all is well now. I am happily using a socks5 proxy server and all of the settings are back in the UI.

I’m uploading these mainly for me to keep track of, but hey, if someone happens upon this post and wants it for themselves have at it:

gaim-1.5.0-52.jw.src.rpm
gaim-1.5.0-52.jw.i586.rpm
gaim-devel-1.5.0-52.jw.i586.rpm