If you’ve ever tried to setup your Google Talk account for your own domain in the Pidgin multi-protocol instant messenger client, you might have noticed that the settings aren’t terribly obvious. Here’s how to do it. Open up Pidgin and choose Accounts –> Manage Accounts. Then click the Add button.

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Then you’ll want to enter in your username as the beginning of your email address, and the Domain as the part after the @ symbol. For instance, mine is geek@howtogeek.com, so I’m using geek as the username and howtogeek.com as the Domain.

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Then flip over to the Advanced tab, and enter talk.google.com as the Connect server. You can pretty much leave the other settings alone if you want.

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At this point you can click the Save button, and then you should be able to enable the account via the Accounts menu.