Empathy's Frequently Asked Questions

Account Creation

How can I create / enable an account (without entering my password)?

You must enter a password.

What if I'm not willing to have my password saved to disk?

Bugs have been filed against GNOME and Ubuntu.

How can I connect to (a protocol) in Empathy ?

You need to install an appropriate connection manager (protocol backend). For the most common protocols:

AIM: install telepathy-haze
Jabber, Google Talk, XMPP: install telepathy-gabble
local network ("Bonjour" - iChat-compatible): install telepathy-salut
ICQ: install telepathy-haze
IRC: install telepathy-idle, see below for more notes on IRC
MSN: install telepathy-butterfly
SIP: install telepathy-sofiasip, see below for more notes on SIP
Yahoo!: install telepathy-haze
Facebook chat : see Facebook instructions

Various other protocols supported by libpurple (Gadu-Gadu, Groupwise, Myspace, Sametime, SILC, Zephyr) should theoretically work if you install telepathy-haze, but might not be very well-tested.

Until some D-Bus bugs have been fixed, you might need to log out and log back in to be able to create accounts using a newly installed connection manager.

We plan to integrate packagekit to install missing package, help is welcome on bug #518429

General and Chat

How can I install new themes in Empathy ?

The instruction to use the new Adium Themes in Empathy are on the Empathy/Themes page. Note that you will need Empathy 2.27.3 compiled with WebKit support for Adium Themes to work.

How can I create a theme in Empathy?

These are normal Adium Message Styles (albeit a few features still don't work see Empathy/Themes). To create one you can use the Creating Message Styles documentation on the Adium wiki.

Can I change the font of Adium Theme Styles?

Yes, to change the theme style font, locate your theme style folder. Edit the file Info.plist which in the folder "Contents"

Will Empathy have OTR ("Off The Record") support?

We think that the correct approach to secure end-to-end communications is to support it natively in the protocol. There is ongoing work on standardising secure end-to-end messaging in Jingle (using XTLS and Jingle) and we plan to support this in the future (current API sketch).

We don't think that layering encrypted messaging on top of protocols that don't support it is very useful, since such extensions won't, by definition, work in native protocol clients, and any clients that do go out of their way to support encrypted messaging might as well do so using a native protocol.

I can't hear any sound notifications.

In Ubuntu the sound themes doesn't contain yet the sounds needed by Empathy. There is a bug reported on Launchpad. At the moment you can use [http://cgit.freedesktop.org/sound-theme-freedesktop/snapshot/sound-theme-freedesktop-0.7.tar.gz|this sound theme]]. Make sure the sound notification are activated both in Empathy preference and Gnome sound properties. You will also need to set the sound theme to Default instead of Ubuntu.

How can I disable idling / auto-away?

Switch to Pidgin. (not really, missing documentation)

Audio and Video calls

Does Empathy support audio and video chat?

Yes. Empathy should be compatible with any client which implement Jingle and supports ICE and the corresponding XEPs properly.

For which protocols does Empathy support audio and video chat?

Currently for SIP/XMPP/Gtalk/MSN.

Which video codec do I need?

For calls between empathy and empathy, all you need is theora, which is installed by default on all distributions.
For calls between empathy and gtalk, you need h264 encoder. On ubuntu you can get it by installing gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse.
For calls between empathy and Windows Live Messenger, you need h263 encoder.

To know if a codec is installed, you can use that command:

$ gst-inspect-0.10 | grep 264

Make sure you have encoder and decoder in the list. For h264 you'll have x264enc encoder for example. Similar command can be used for other codecs.

Some codecs have known issues:

h263 encoder does not respect the supported image size. Ubuntu users can use the telepathy ppa to have fixed codec.
theora encoder will freeze after some time. Ubuntu users can use the telepathy ppa to have fixed codec.

Does Empathy support audio and video chat with Google Talk?

Yes, you can have a audio or video chat on the Gtalk protocol with someone using Gmail's video chat feature, Empathy or Pidgin.

Can I do a video chat with a contact using Microsoft Windows?

You can audio and video chat with a Windows user using Gmail's video chat feature.

I can't establish a call. The call gets disconnected right away, Empathy crashes, I can't send/receive video, etc. What am I doing wrong?

You need to have the proper codecs installed. Since some encoders and decoders used are not 100% free, your distro might not ship them by default. Make sure you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-base, gstreamer0.10-plugins-good and gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad installed. Some work is currently being done to give the user more feedback about missing codecs and general video errors.

Furthermore, a bug has been found in gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg which could prevent the video stream in calls to be decoded correctly (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=590172). If you have this problem, you can try to uninstall gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg.

I am using Fedora 11 and Empathy crashes when I try to make a call.

You need the following updated packages:

farsight2-0.0.12-1.fc11
gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.15-3.fc11

Audio may still break because of PulseAudio bugs. Lennart will hopefully fix it soon...

I am using Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) and I can't make MSN call.

Ubuntu disabled audio/video support in telepathy-butterfly (the MSN backend) because this new feature got introduced too late and that feature didn't get much testing.

You can get more up to date packages from our telepathy ppa, they have audio/video enabled for MSN: https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa/

How can I connect to my SIP account?

Install telepathy-sopfiasip.

echo@ekiga.net doesn't work.

This is a problem in the ekiga.net server. Unfortunately this can't be fixed in Telepathy because it will break the compatibility with other SIP servers.

How can I test if audio/video is working?

Collabora is hosting an echo service: echo@test.collabora.co.uk. This is a jabber contact you can add to your roster. When you call it, anything you say will be echoed to you.

Building

I cannot compile empathy master, I get an error in xml2po

Don't compile with -j2, gnome-doc-utils is broken with more than one core

Geolocation

Is this compatible with Google Latitude, Yahoo Fire Eagle or Brightkite?

No. None of these location publishing services is based on an instant messaging protocol. Even the Google Latitude Google Talk bridge is merely updating your status in a way that is not compatible with what Empathy currently support (namely XEP 0080).

Which protocols support location publishing?

Only XMPP (jabber) geolocation publishing (using XEP 0080) is supported so far. Your XMPP server needs to support PEP. Most modern servers do with the very unfortunate exception of Google Talk servers. Even if your server doesn't support PEP, you will be able to receive your contact's location but you won't be able to publish yours.

There is a list of servers supporting PEP.

How can I see what is my published location?

Unfortunately, there is not yet a place in Empathy where you can see what it's publishing as your location. You will have to ask one of your contact, or start Empathy in debug mode.

Why is Empathy not publishing my location?

Once you checked the Publish location checkbox, there is a short delay before the information is made available to your contacts. The information sent to your contacts is based on what Geoclue thinks is your current address and position. If Geoclue can't find where you are, your location is cleared and it appears to your contacts as if you are not publishing your location.

Tools to help debugging Geoclue need to be written.

IRC

How can I connect to IRC in Empathy ?

You need to have telepathy-idle installed. Then you can connect to the IRC server by creating an account, and join a channel by using the Room > Join room dialog.

How can I join a channel protected by a password in Empathy?

Currently you can't do it.

Is there a way to configure Empathy to identify with NickServ?

Yes, just set nickname and password in the account settings dialog.

Does Empathy have /-command functionality (/msg, /join, etc.)?

/me works. And some commands have been added in Empathy 2.29.2, such as /say /nick /join /j /msg /query and /help.

We're not likely to support ad-hoc IRC commands (as if via "/quote" on most IRC clients), at least not at the moment, because Telepathy doesn't have a nice interface for it. (Our view is: telepathy-idle should not parse commands out of regular IMs you try to send. They're not actually part of the IRC protocol at all; see longer version below.)

A longer rationale: it's a common misconception that /me, /join, /msg etc. are part of the IRC network protocol. They're not: they're a common user-interface convention. The Telepathy way to do actions like those is to develop a documented API for each action; if UIs want to implement slash-commands, they can call the appropriate API for each slash-command (for instance, you'd implement /join by doing the same API calls that the Room->Join menu currently uses).

By policy, we don't parse ad-hoc actions out of normal IMs in the protocol backends. If you call a method called SendMessage() (which is how Empathy sends IMs), it should send a message, and nothing more.

Empathy supports /me, which turns into a Telepathy message of type ACTION. telepathy-idle, the IRC backend, turns those messages into a CTCP ACTION, which is what any other IRC client would do when you type /me; other clients do other things with those messages.

Connection issues

Please also see the troubleshooting document for individual protocols.

I can't connect to my AIM/ICQ account anymore

You need to change an advanced configuration option. Open a terminal and type the following commands to get the name of your AIM/ICQ account:

$ mc-tool list | grep icq
$ mc-tool list | grep aim

Then change the option using:

$ mc-tool update <aim account name> bool:use-clientlogin=false

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