Google Talk on Kopete

So I have been using Kopete as a Google Talk client for a looooonnngggg time but a little accident (Human error of course) I got my Kopete configuration files gone. Well it is not big deal as setting my accounts again is very easy. MSN and Yahoo are supported by default and is easy to remember how to set them again but Google Talk is just a little more difficult to remember as it is actually a Jabber account you must set up. There is not such thing as Google Talk on Kopete but since it uses the Jabber protocol (XMPP) we can use the Jabber plugin to connect to Google Talk server.

Setting up Kopete

This is very simple in fact simply create a new Jabber account in Kopete and set the Jabber ID to your be your Gmail account and the password to your Gmail accout password.

Jabber ID: my_nick@gmail.com
password: my_gmail_password

Next go to the Connection tab and check all options and change the server to talk.google.com

[x] Use protocol encryption (SSL)
[x] Allow plain-text password authentication
[x] Override default server information

Server: talk.google.com
Port: 5223

Finished!! now I can use Kopete to chat with all my Google Talk friends. Next the difficult part of this is to convince all my 100 MSN contacts to switch to Gmail.

Notes on the TLS thing

Google talk requires the connection to be encrypted to be able to connect to the server. This is good for privacy and security reasons. To support encrypted connections Kopete uses a library called QCA so we must make sure Kopete has access to this library before we can use it as a Google Talk client.

In Kubuntu the QCA library package is called qca-tls and it seems to be installed by default. If not make sure you install this library when installing kopete.

sudo aptitude install qca-tls kopete

In other distros it may be similar. More details of these can be found at the KDE wiki page.