Just a quickie (it’s all I’ve had time for lately). I wanted to play with Pidgin on my work machine (I use Gaim to provide support to users around campus) and figured I’d see what the program looks like. Since there isn’t a package available from the Ubuntu repos, I set about compiling and installing it myself.
Firstly, I installed the dependencies that are required for Gaim (got this tip by googling, can’t remember where)
sudo apt-get build-dep gaim
Then I installed build-essential and libglib2.0-dev (I already had these installed, just put that here for completeness)
sudo apt-get install build-essential libglib2.0-dev
I downloaded the program source from http://pidgin.im/pidgin/download/ and put it into ~/src/. After the download, I extracted everything from the archive (tar -xjvf pidgin-2.0.0.tar.bz2), changed into the ~/src/pidgin-2.0.0 directory and ran the configure script (which seemed to complete normally)
./configure
Then I ran make
make
Then I installed
sudo make install
This method about above will install Pidgin and its dependencies to /usr/local/lib and will automagically install a menu item for the application in your Gnome menu under Internet.
If you do the same, just remember that whenever there’s a new Pidgin release you’ll need to download, compile and install, your package manager has no idea what-so-ever that you’ve done this.
Check out the release notes and enjoy 
Edit: fixed some silly spelling errors