After some first attempts at fixing SELinux settings, switching SELinux on and off, rerunning rlpkg -a -r, and obviously furiously checking /var/log, I was out of ideas and started searching the web for anyone with a similar problem.

There I found many suggestions, such as checking ~/.xsession-errors (how did I miss that?). Turns out this file was cut off rather abruptly, without (at least so it seemed to me) a clear reason and clearly different from any other .xsession-errors files I had available. Hence reinforcing my idea that some SELinux kernel panic was the reason for my troubles.

When searching through Gentoo Bugzilla, I stumbled upon bug #274887, concerning a kernel panic occurring when using sys-kernel/hardened-sources-2.6.28-r9 and SELinux. A simple workaround was to use selinux_compat_net=0 when booting the kernel. Turns out that this finally fixed it for me. Yay! Now to decide: wait for the devs to apply the kernel patch or manually upgrade to a newer (non-stable) kernel?

Figured I’d try enabling and disabling some of the USE flags for Pidgin, but without any luck, it still crashed. Then I went for compiling it with the debug USE flag enabled, as was suggested when running from the terminal. (yeah, yeah, should’ve gone for that sooner )

This time I found out the crash occurred immediately when the perl module was probed:

(22:11:20) plugins: probing /usr/lib/purple-2/perl.so
Hi, user. We need to talk.
I think something’s gone wrong here. It’s probably my fault.
No, really, it’s not you… it’s me… no no no, I think we get along well it’s just that…. well, I want to see other people. I… what?!? NO! I haven’t been cheating on you!! How many times do you want me to tell you?! And for the last time, it’s just a rash!
Aborted

Somehow it crashed right there, but I have as of yet not figured out why. My (temporary) solution is to merge Pidgin with the perl USE flag disabled, as it is enabled by default.

Enter nano
nano -w /etc/portage/package.use
and append or insert the following line:
net-im/pidgin gtk -perl
(if you use Gnome by default you’ll probably not need to add the gtk USE flag)

When remerging Pidgin after this, I can open the plugins dialog without any problems. Thing is: I can’t reproduce this problem on my trusty little netbook, which is rather odd. Probably has something to do with my perl install or config… but I don’t feel like diving in there (yet). It works, I’m happy, but if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to drop me a line.

On a related note, I prefer the smileys used on Gathering of Tweakers and found out they are included in the smileypack available through Portage.

If you’re using stable, you’ll find that it is masked, so add
x11-themes/pidgin-smileys ~x86
(change for whatever arch you’re using) to package.keywords:
nano -w /etc/portage/package.keywords
and you are free to emerge the pack:
emerge pidgin-smileys
You don’t have to restart Pidgin to enable them, just head on over to preferences and enjoy!

Update 25th of June 2009: You can also extract the larger DiGiTheme zipfile in ~/.purple/smileys for even more GoT (and some MSN) smileys