Using Facebook XMPP chat on Ubuntu

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Hi everyone, my name is Alan and I do have a Facebook account. There, done it. Feels better already.
I don’t use it that much, and frankly I find it a little disturbing the way it mixes up all your friends, family and work contacts so they all talk to each other. But this isn’t a post about my insecurities and paranoid delusions. No, it is a post about Ubuntu and XMPP. Facebook now does XMPP, which is an instant messaging protocol also known as Jabber. It is the same thing Google talk uses and the same thing that the most awesome OLPC XO uses for communication.

  • First up you need to set a facebook username up. Log on to facebook and go to your account settings page. Set your username if you haven’t already. I chose alanbelltolc, to match my twitter and identi.ca names. Now I think you have to log out of facebook and back in – this might not be appears to be a necessary step.
  • Now run Empathy, Applications-Internet-Empathy Instant Messenger.
  • Press F4 or go to Edit-Accounts in the Empathy menu.
  • Press the Add button and choose Jabber from the dropdown list of account types.
  • Press the Create button.
  • Your login ID is username@chat.facebook.com – we think it prefers all lower case
  • Your password is your facebook password
  • Now make sure the account is enabled (checkbox next to the account name on the left)
  • It may ask you if you want to let it save your password in the gnome keyring at this point.
  • Make yourself available and the names and pictures of both of your friends should appear!

The account setting dialog as you go through the setup:

You can chat with your friends

You even get lovely libnotify popups like this one >>

Update
If you want to try it out on someone please feel free to find me on Facebook and . . . um what is the verb? XMPP me? Jab me? Next up I will have to take Debian off my OLPC, put Sugar back on and try and get Sugar to use Facebook as a back end.

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35 Comments

  • Arthur says:

    Yup, tried that, and it doesn’t work for me. Maybe its because I have periods in my username.

    However under pidgin it works just fine.

    • TommyMac says:

      I found that even though I used Camel Case when I set up my user name, Facebook wouldn’t authorize it unless I used lower case. Try that.

  • Don says:

    I have the same problem as Arthur, works fine in Pidgin but in Empathy I get “Authentication Failed”, my username is all letters though.

  • Anecdotal evidence is that it works consistently for some people, and not at all for others; some of the Telepathy and Empathy developers are able to connect, and some aren’t. The Facebook XMPP server is very new and may still be rather wobbly, so it’s probably more worthwhile to try to debug after it’s been going for a few days.

  • Paul Tansom says:

    Set up quite happily in my Empathy install. I have a period in my username too (paul.tansom). I had initial problems until it dawned on me that I needed to ‘Reuse an existing account’ rather than ‘Create a new account’. Until that point I was getting the ‘Authentication Failed’ error. A case of using an existing Facebook account, rather than creating a new account on the Facebook Jabber server using your existing Facebook credentials.

  • Don says:

    Ah, thanks Paul, that fixed it, I didn’t realise what that “reuse existing account” option was for.

  • After adding a username (www.facebook.com/whatever) to your Facebook account, it seems you need to log out of the website, log back in, *then* connect with Empathy; until you do that, you’ll get “Authentication Error” in Empathy, even though the profile URL with the username in works immediately! Hopefully the Facebook people can make this step unnecessary soon.

  • […] Read this article: The Open Sourcerer » Using Facebook XMPP discuss on Ubuntu […]

  • Andy Piper says:

    Aha! yes Paul is right – you need to reuse an existing account to avoid the authentication error. Now I’m all hooked up in Empathy. Sweet!

  • […] clients and the general information needed to connect any other client. There also exists a step-by-step guide for Empathy. Do note, that when adding the account, you want to “Reuse an existing account”, and […]

  • Paul Tansom says:

    I didn’t have much success with that plugin. I couldn’t manage to be logged into Facebook in a browser and with Pidgin at the same time. Pidgin would force the browser to log out somehow. I decided not to bother, but Pidgin connects nicely with XMPP now, so if I go back to Pidgin I’ll use that. I’m still not entirely sure which I prefer, both Empathy and Pidgin have pros and cons.

  • […] Using Facebook XMPP chat on Ubuntu The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Hi everyone, my name is Alan and I do have a Facebook account. There, done it. Feels better already. I don’t use it that much, and frankly I find it a little disturbing the way it mixes up all your friends, family and work contacts so they all talk to each other. But this isn’t a post about my insecurities and paranoid delusions. No, it is a post about Ubuntu and XMPP. Facebook now does XMPP, which is an instant messaging protocol also known as Jabber. It is the same thing Google talk uses and the same thing that the most awesome OLPC XO uses for communication. […]

  • foo says:

    Sugar is available in Debian, why not just install sugar into your Debian install?

  • Alan Bell says:

    @foo, good point, easier to debug on a desktop than on the real hardware. I have put sugar back on the XO (and overclocked it again) it doesn’t work with Facebook yet, but I think it might do with a bit of a tweak in the telepathy sugar-presence-service area.

  • Milos Sreckovic says:

    I use pidgin, but, I’m green(online) all the time. Every other account on pidgin goes away(or I put it that way, no diference).
    Is there some way to other see me as idle?

  • ben says:

    fantastic thank you very much

  • Ben says:

    Works fine for me, and I have a dot in my name.

    Anyway, if you want to organize your contacts, just put your friends on facebook into categories; they’ll appear in the same categories on Empathy (you may have to log out and back in again before seeing the changes). 😉

  • […] [The Open Sourcerer] Also Read Add Facebook-like Chat to your Website with the jQuery Chat ModuleA Closer Look at […]

  • AndreaDFC says:

    Thanks to Paul Tansom: I had problems because I did not know I had to use the “Reuse an existing account” option. Then I read your suggestion and… it works now!

  • Chris (Openxs) says:

    Good stuff! I had to use the “existing account” option to make it work, but work it does and now I can be harassed by instant message as well as phone, email, text message, letter…. nice one guys!

  • Steven says:

    In Empathy on Ubuntu 10.04 (still in beta right now) there is a Facebook connection type. Just give it your UN and PW and it works fine.

  • shanil says:

    thanks guys, after creating a username u have to log back into facebook before connecting to empathy and u wont get that silly authentication error anymore..enjoy empathy

  • Bean says:

    Steven–I still had to follow this process to get Empathy to work for me on Ubuntu 10.04.

    Just a tip–if you, for whatever reason, have an aversion to creating a username, you can use the ID number that links to your profile (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=63209097989) as “u63209097989@chat.facebook.com” and it should work (changing the numbers for your profile but keeping the “u”).

  • Nathan says:

    Also I had to go into the Advanced Settings and Override the server settings with “chat.facebook.com” and Port “5222”.

  • jaz says:

    thanks for the tutorial,, now i can chat in one application for more than 1 kind of chat

  • Russell says:

    Thanks! I got it to work, it works perfectly, thanks alot!!

  • @musibolun says:

    it will be perfect if ubuntu one can backup the chats for empathy

  • luisteletrabajo says:

    It works! Excellent job, thanks a lot!

  • Joaquim Leite says:

    With the help in this blog I’ve just managed to put empathy at work in a very old machine with Xubuntu 9.04. Thank you.

  • Jaizi says:

    Where can i find that empathy xD

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