Empathy can support any protocol that pidgin does – this includes facebook chat.
Whilst there is no user-end plugin framework for Empathy as of yet, there is a simple hack around to get Facebook chat working in it.
Requirements
You’ll need to have Pidgin installed along with the pidgin-facebookchat plugin, too. (See here for that.)
You’ll also need to be running a version of Empathy that is 2.28 or later. If you’re using Karmic, you should be all set!
Enable Facebook Chat In Empathy
First we need to remove the haze.manager file. be caeful with the command below and make sure you type it identical to how it is below.
- sudo rm /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager
Now we need to get some facebook icons for Empathy to use.
- http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip
- gksudo nautilus /usr/share/empathy/icons/hicolour/
- killall empathy
- pkill mission-control-5
The Current Draw Back
Annoyingly in the most recent version of telepathy-haze there is a bug when adding a facebook account that results in a crash. It’s still worth enabling this for when the bug is squashed in a later update to telepathy.