Naver’s LINE is basically the mobile communication platform in Japan at this point. Teens aren’t sharing email addresses anymore, it’s their LINE usernames. Just a while ago, we had new recruits coming to the studio for training, and they’d all write down their names, phone numbers and LINE names.

Obviously I use it too. Thing is, it’s not so obvious how to use it on a computer. There is an official client for Windows that works, but there’s none for Linux. I hate writing long messages on my phone, so the effort of having to compile a Pidgin plugin for the LINE protocol is worth the effort.

It was quite an effort too, since I purged my system a while back, and I had no dev packages, or even git installed. Needless to say, it took almost an hour to get everything up and running. Most time taken by the Apache Thrift install, that would keep failing with C++ when using the 0.9.1 tarball, no matter what I did.

Luckily the git latest worked fine, and the plugin seems to work okay too at this point.