Frequently Asked Questions
What does Kopete mean? How do I pronounce it?
Kopete's name comes from the chilean word Copete, meaning a drink with your friends. Duncan, the original author, recorded an audio sample.
When I have more than one messaging service under a user's name in my contact list and I click on that user's name, it will message them on the wrong messaging service.
You can change the order of accounts Kopete tries to message people with by using the Up and Down arrows in the bottom right corner of the account configuration screen. Kopete will try to connect with accounts starting from the top. However, if one service has a higher status value than the others for that user, Kopete will use that one. For example, if a person has three services and two are marked as away and the third is marked as online, Kopete will always try to message the user using the online service.
If you click on the small protocol icon on the right of the menu item, instead of on the person's name, you will always try to contact the person using that service!
I need to connect via a SOCKS proxy, but I cannot find any proxy configuration options in Kopete. How do I set up Kopete to use SOCKS?
WLM, ICQ, AIM, Jabber, and Yahoo use the network infrastructure. Their SOCKS proxy details are configured with the rest of , in , Network and Connectivity Network Settings Proxy.
Is it possible to customize the icons I see in Kopete?
You can switch between different emoticons using the Emoticons tab of the Appearance page of the Configure Kopete dialog.
To install new emoticons, first look at KDE-Look.org, where there are a lot of additional emoticon sets to download.
The emoticons are easy to install - you just place a folder containing the icon files along with an file describing the mapping from text to picture in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kopete/pics/emoticons (or $KDEHOME, for example, in /home/joeuser/.kde/).
Copy the extracted folder to $KDEDIR/share/apps/kopete/pics/emoticons or $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kopete/pics/emoticons (or wherever $KDEHOME is)
Select Configure Kopete from the Settings menu and click on Appearance in the left panel of the Preferences window and click on the Emoticons tab
Select the emoticons set you just installed from the list
Now you can use the newly installed emoticons in Kopete
To replace the protocol icons, you'll have to replace the icons in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kopete/icons, or provide replacements to override them in the same folder under $KDEHOME. At present there aren't any complete replacement sets that you can simply extract there.
I don't see any plugins listed in the Configure Plugins dialog. What's up?
There are two solutions to this problem. If you used binary packages, then make sure that you used binary packages designed for your distribution, and the specific version of your distribution. Crossing distributions and versions around will not work with Kopete. If there are no binary packages for your system, you must compile Kopete using the source packages. If you compiled your , then Kopete must go in the same prefix as did. If, however, you compiled the source packages, then make sure that your Kopete is installed in the same location as your , if it is not, you can force it to do so by specifying a prefix command to cmake. Example: cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX=/opt/kde4 (where /opt/kde4 is your prefix). To determine where your prefix is, type which dolphin in a window. It should display something like /opt/kde4/bin/dolphin, then /opt/kde4 would be your prefix, or if it says /usr/bin/dolphin, then your prefix would be /usr. Also make sure you performed a make install, and check that there is no stale Kopete installation from previous versions in different locations. You might also need to run kbuildsycoca4 manually after installing Kopete. kbuildsycoca4 updates the plugin database. It runs when new software using plugins is installed, but it is possible that kopete will run Kopete before the update has completed.
I have many <desktops / monitors / computers> and / or I talk to many people at the same time, and as a result I wish Kopete could play a <sound / pop up a message / change my wallpaper / reboot my computer > whenever I <receive a new message / someone goes online / someone goes offline > When will this be added?
It is already there (surprise!). Kopete is a application and thus makes use of KNotify for all notifications. For those who don't know, KNotify is a very powerful architecture that lets you do pretty much anything you want when an event occurs in a application. You can play a sound, pop up a passive dialog, log a message, or even run your own custom commands, such as a shell script, to do anything your heart desires. To access this treasure trove, go into the Settings Configure Notifications dialog. This will present you with all the different actions you can take on the events listed just above. As a tip, check out some of your other applications to see what events they let you catch. I for one find a passive popup on new emails in to be very handy.
How come file transfers don't work?
There are many reasons for this. WLM was the the first protocol in which we've implemented support for file transfers. Support for file transfers in Jabber and IRC was added in Kopete 0.9.0 (included in 3.3), and ICQ and AIM in Kopete 0.50.0 (included in 4.0.0). Also, file transfers may not work if you're behind a firewall - see WLM section in the protocol chapter.
Why all of this silly single-click behavior? It's very annoying!
Kopete is a application. We are not some lame 3rd party application that decides to "look" like the rest of KDE. We also have the "feel" and "integration" aspect of KDE, which means that Kopete follows KDE's standard "Single-click" behavior. If you would like to change this it requires you to change it in all of KDE. You can change to a double-click style by starting and go to Input Devices Mouse and change to the option Double-click to open files and folders (select icons on first click).
Will you make the user-interface skinnable?
The only answer for this is no. Kopete was invented to be a Instant-Messenger and this also includes having a Look-n-Feel. By adding skins we would break this rule and having both skin-support and skinless-support at once is impractical as well. Just select a different style in 's and be happy to have transparent menus and other neat eye-candy today's offers. You can, however, run kopete using a different style. Just run kopete --style=marble as an example. Any valid or style will work.
I would like a feature in the next version of Kopete.
Please go to Bugzilla and file a wishlist item under the application 'kopete'. Please be very detailed and proof-read what you have written to us. This is NOT a guarantee that we will add this feature in any version, but allows us to consider it.
My Kopete crashed or has/had unexpected behavior (unexpected behavior does NOT fall in the category of "Kopete doesn't act like Pidgin", ).
Please report this bug to us by going to Bugzilla and file a bug report under the application 'kopete'. Bugs will only be accepted if they are in English, they are detailed, and if a crash was involved they contain a backtrace (the text in the tab marked Backtrace once Kopete has crashed). If you are using Kopete git, however, please mail us at Kopete developers mailing list instead of filing a bug report.
Jabber SSL support stopped working, I get the message that the QCA TLS plugin is probably missing. What am I supposed to do?
As the error message indicates, you are missing the QCA TLS plugin, which handles the Jabber plugin's TLS/SSL encryption. Install the package qca-tls (and eventually qca-ossl) or retrieve the plugin from its homepage. Please note that you only need to install the qca-tls plugin, not the QCA library itself. A recompilation of Kopete is not necessary, in fact not even a restart. In case you have installed the plugin and it still won't work, Qt can probably not find it. Since qca-tls installs itself as a plugin, you will have to make sure that it gets installed to the plugin directory of the version you are using to run Kopete.
I AM behind a firewall. Which ports need to be open for WLM file transfers?
If you are behind a firewall, port 6891 needs to be open to inbound TCP traffic.
I use Jabber and ICQ together. Whenever I go online with Jabber, I am disconnected from ICQ with an error message about being connected from another client. What's up?
Remember when you played with ICQ transports on that other Jabber client? You set up an ICQ Transport which allows you to talk to ICQ people from Jabber. ICQ doesn't allow multiple connections to the same account, and disconnects you. Look in your Jabber contacts for a contact of the form 123456@icq.jabber.org and delete it.