How to get OTR encryption for gajim

About

The gajim people agreed to host the Off-The-Record encryption branch on their servers as an official branch.

This howto will guide you through the process of installing gajim-otr. In case you have comments, don't hesitate to contact me via mail or jabber at fnord@pentabarf.de.


Prerequisites

You will need libotr and python-otr. They have to be compatible:

libotr version required python-otr version
3.1.0 1.x
3.2.0 2.x

See also How to install python-otr.


Getting gajim-otr

gajim-otr is maintained in a branch over at gajim's mercurial repository.

To obtain the newest code based on gajim's development tree (likely unstable) you need to have mercurial installed. You can use:

hg clone -r otr http://hg.gajim.org/gajim/ gajim-otr

Alternatively, you can download gajim-otr based on the latest gajim stable release (0.12.5): tar.gz (gpg sig).

Installing & running

Afterwards, you can either launch it directly from the source tree:

cd gajim-otr
./launch.sh

... or you install it:

cd gajim-otr
./autogen.sh   # only necessary when you used mercurial, not for the tar.gz!
./configure
make
make install   # as root or using sudo / similar

# now simply launch it:
gajim

Debian / Ubuntu package

A .deb package is available at launchpad's PPA service.

If you're using Ubuntu 8.04 or newer, you can include the following line in your /etc/apt/sources.list (replace hardy with intrepid or jaunty, depending on your release):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gajim-otr-dev/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Afterwards, update your apt cache and install / upgrade gajim:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gajim

# now simply launch it:
gajim