Keep in touch with all your friends and family using Pidgin, the free multi-protocol instant messaging program. Tutorial 5 - Installing OTR for private conversations

When chatting on the internet, it is important to remember that your conversations are not normally encrypted in any way. Should you use instant messaging in a corporate environment, or to discuss anything private, you should take additional steps to ensure your conversations are not intercepted. Fortunately, thanks to the OTR (off the record) plugin for Pidgin, this is easy.

Note that for OTR encrypted messaging to work, both you and your contact must have OTR installed. Your contact could use Pidgin OTR, or another messaging program which supports OTR. Other OTR compatible software includes Trillian for Windows and Adium for the Apple Macintosh.

Installing OTR for Pidgin is really easy. First, download the latest version from the OTR download page. The link you are looking for should read "Win32 installer for Pidgin 2.x". It is filed under "OTR plugin for Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim)".

Download the installer to your desktop or somewhere where you can easily find it. Once you have downloaded the installer, double click on it or choose open in your browsers download manager to start the installation process.

Windows Vista users may need to enter their administrator password and/or grant permission for the installer to continue.

Once the installation has started, the following window will be displayed:-

Click "Next >". The following window will then be displayed:-

Scroll down to read the licence agreement and if you agree, click on "I Agree". The following window will then appear:-

Here you can choose a location to install the OTR plugin (note that this should not be in the same directory as Pidgin itself). The default location is fine for most users, so simply click on "Install" to start installing the software. The following window will then appear:-

There will be a short pause while files are copied and configured. When the copy process is complete, the following window will be displayed:-

The installation process is now finished. Click on "Finish" and a text file will be displayed explaining briefly how to configure Pidgin and the plugin. However, we'll be covering that in more detail in our next tutorial.