Andrew Errington wrote:
On Sun, May 31, 2009 12:56, Derek Smithies wrote:
On Sun, 31 May 2009, Andrew Errington wrote:
On Sun, May 31, 2009 06:04, Derek Smithies wrote:
The most surefire way of fixing this?
Use skype.
Seriously, you can fiddle for hours getting this to work.
Except that Skype is proprietary and closed. SIP is the Right Answer,
so it's worth persevering.
Yes, you are right in one sense..
Picture yourself in a hotel, far away from home, and keen to ring the
wife and family. A skype call will (well, most often) get through
<snip>
Or a "telephone", or a "mobile phone". I hear these are capable of
sending "txt msgs" too.
Yes, you can fiddle with sip like phones. However, in my jaundiced
experience, they are filled with gobbledygoodk like words that make them
hard to setup. Look at Barry's problems. He is not a voip developer, but
he is capable enough to do many linux like things. And he had trouble
getting Ekiga to work. Skype, on the other hand, is sufficiently easy to
setup that people with the minimum of computer skills can make voip calls.
Or you could use Gizmo, the (proprietary) gateway drug to SIP.
Drug here: www.gizmoproject.com
(about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmo_Project)
Using Ekiga discussion:
<http://grokbase.com/topic/2006/02/24/ekiga-and-gizmo-project/wGgMcx-duioKMhOEDSZxS840zlM>
It is only on linux that Skype gets hard to setup - mainly cause of the
"Welcome to the jungle phenomenon" talked about on slashdot recently.
Which was (effectively): linux sound is a mess.
Hmm. apt-get install skype, and, err, that's it.
I have no more problems with software on my Linux systems than I do with
Windows. Specks of sawdust and wooden beams come to mind.
Chris & I have tried skype. There is no problem with text, only a little
with speech, but video is a different beast. Sometimes the camera will
be activated but I get no picture, other times my image will be split in
two only the top half respnding to movement. This split image is
transmitted to Chris.
skype sometimes does not grab the xv port because another app has
grabbed it. I can shut down every running app without freeing the port,
when this happens the only option left is to reboot, even restarting X
fails to cure the problem. I have found some aspects of skype ok, others
decidedly flakey, and a call to skype and their offer of a reply within
2 days or so was ignored.
Barry
