Pidgin 2.5.6 is now available for download, but not on it's website just yet, but on SourceForge.Download Pidgin 2.5.6
So far there are only .exe and source files available, when it will be released on it's website (pidgin.im), there will also be .deb files available for Ubuntu, etc.
Update: now you can get it from it's website: http://pidgin.im/ (install for Ubuntu)
Changes in version 2.5.6:
libpurple:
* Improve sleep behavior by aggregation of longer timeouts on second
boundaries to allow better power saving. (Arunan Balasubramaniam)
* Fix various crashes on exit.
* Make XML parsing more resilient to interactions with other libraries.
This, along with the fix for libxml2 bug 564217, fixes the crashes
on connect in XMPP with recent gst-plugins-bad (see #8830 for details).
* Many security related fixes
IRC:
* Correctly handle WHOIS for users who are joined to a large number of
channels.
* Notify the user if a /nick command fails, rather than trying
fallback nicks.
MSN:
* Fix a race condition causing occasional Pidgin crashes.
* Fix some errors about the friendly name changing too fast caused
by MSN/Yahoo integration buddies.
XMPP:
* Less likely to pop up a new conversation window in disregard of
the "Hide new IM conversations" preference.
Yahoo:
* Fix a crash when sending very long messages.
* Fix a bug where UTF-8 status messages get garbled when going idle.
[via stadt-bremerhaven.de]
