Joe's Random Ramblings

Earlier this year, Yahoo changed the login protocol for the Yahoo Instant Messaging service.
This resulted in Kopete, the instant messenger tool for KDE, to no longer being able to log into the Yahoo IM service. The background is explained in detail here.
There was a quick fix for KDE 4.x available, but people like me who are using KDE 3.5 and don't think KDE 4 is ready for primetime yet (or who just don't want to change an otherwise perfectly running system), were left out, essentially forcing us to use another IM client, like Pidgin.
Eventually, though, somebody created a patch for KDE 3.5 for Ubuntu, which solves the login issue.
I am using Slackware, not Ubuntu, though, so I used the Slackware build system to create a kdenetwork package for Slackware 12.2 that contains the fixed Kopete.
I used the source code from the Slackware 12.2 DVD, just adding two files in the source/kde/kdenetwork directory: a shell script which applies the patch during the build process, and the patch itself.
The final Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package is here (12MB.) It can be installed in two steps:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-login.tgz


Update: The ICQ protocol also is broken in the latest kopete for KDE 3.5.
Using the patch from here, I have now created a new Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package that re-enables both the Yahoo and the ICQ protocols. It is just another patch that gets applied to the normal source package. The resulting binary package, with both patches applied, is here. Similar to the instructions above, it can be installed this way:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-icq-login.tgz


Update 2: Since sometime in October or November 2010, ICQ connections started to fail. As it turns out, this has nothing to do with the protocol. AOL recently sold ICQ, and as a result, the server URL has changed. In the Kopete configuration for ICQ, in the account preferences, the default server needs to be overridden and changed to login.icq.com. The port number stays the same.

As a long time Slackware user, the recent announcement of Slackware 12.1 was a very welcome event. So I went to the Torrent download page to get the Slackware 12.1 DVD.
However, upon launching ktorrent, the KDE torrent client, to start the torrent download, my DSL connection went haywire. I had to reset the DSL modem (a Siemens SpeedStream 4100) and also reset the network port.
After searching for clues on the Net, I found that disabling DHT and limiting the number of connections (to 20 connections per torrent) solved the problem.