On Wednesday and Friday nights at 7:00pm the client shuts down entirely, on Monday and Friday mornings Pidgin gets restarted. This would start Pidgin at 8:00am, set my status to “Away” at 8:01am, “Available” at 9:00am, “Away – At lunch” at 1:30pm, “Available” again at 2:30pm, “Away” at 5:30pm. I fired up crontab -e and entered: # IM StatusĠ1 08 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message="Ġ0 09 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="ģ0 13 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=At lunch"ģ0 14 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="ģ0 17 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message="Ġ0 19 * * Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "quit" Starting Pidgin is just a matter of running: /usr/bin/pidgin
I can also cause Pidgin to exit with: /usr/bin/purple-remote "quit" I could set the status to “Available” and blank the status message by typing: /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message=" I found I could set Pidigin’s status to “Away” and the status message to “At lunch” by typing: /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=At lunch" Once purple-remote was installed, I fired up a terminal and did a little experimenting on the command line. The purple-remote program is included in the libpurple-bin package, which I installed with System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.
I did a little digging and found a command-line program called purple-remote that allows me to automatically update the Pidgin status and message lines. So I figured I’d automate the process, automatically setting Pidgin status to “Away” and “Available” using cron, turning the work-client off entirely on Thursdays and weekends, and automatically turning the home-client on Thursday mornings and off Thursday night. I usually end up ssh-ing into my work box from home and killing the Pidgin client off remotely, but sometimes I forget and when I come back to work on Friday there are a half-dozen “Are you there?” -type messages on my Pidgin work-client. I work from home on Thursdays, and I’m always forgetting to turn Pidgin off when I leave work on Wednesday. I’m running Ubuntu both at work and at home and I use the Pidgin IM client to talk to the Jabber server. At work we use a Jabber instant messenger (IM) server for internal company communications, so that regardless of whether someone is in the office, working from home, or on the road, they can be reached via IM.