Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Articles & tips and tricks on GNU/, FreeBSD, Windows, mobile phone articles, religious related texts http://www.pc-freak.net/blog a good working voice over IP alternative

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If you never tried linphone I warmly recommend it. 2 days ago, with a friend of mine we tested a bunch of Linux softwares to find out what is the situation with possible alternatives to Skype to transmit Voice and Video. I've been interested into Skype Alternative programs since about 2 years, but so far I never found good and easy to set up working Linux alternative.

We first tried . Though it is said to be a good Linux SKype alternative, my ekiga running on Linux stable Squeeze ver. 3.2.7.2 failed to connect to SIP account I've created on ekiga.net. I've tried hard to make ekiga connect to account SIP created from ekiga.net but all time I was getting an error on connect:

Ekiga did not manage to configure your network settings automatically. You can still use it, but you need to configure your network settings manually.

Please see http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Enable_port_forwarding_manually for instructions

After continously trying to follow instructions from above pointed URL and making proper settings on my DL-524 Wireless Router and all time ending up with the annoying error, we decided to finally completely abondoned it and try some other voice over IP clients. We tried and few others which prooved to be unworking. Finally we give a try to Linphone which seemed to be promising. We tested it On Linux platform, where both of Linux installed OS-es where tested were running Debian Linux (one stable Debian Squeeze and one unstable Debian Blackstar). Linphone even with different versions on different Debian Linux OS-es worked fine Video conferences were crashing but voice over IP via SIP protocol works okay.

Setting up linphone to do speak (voice over IP) conference calls with friends is easy task, you need to have linphone package installed, i.e. run: apt-get install --yes linphone

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Then once installed launch it from terminal or GNOME menus with:

$ linphone-3

You will have to create account on linphone.org's website via Register a Linphone account. Once registered and confirmed the account, linphone sends you an email with credential info, through e-mail like:

Dear Linphone user, your account has been activated.

You can now use your linphone account with these parameters :

Sip identity : sip:[email protected] Username : hipo Domain / Proxy : sip.linphone.org

Regards, The Linphone team.

Then in linphone you should configure new created Linphone account via:

Linphone -> Preferences -> Manager SIP Account

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Once account is added, calls via SIP protocol are ready to go. Probabl,y due to incompitability between versions of Debian stable Linux and unstable the user you will add and about to call is showing as offline, however calling between each other works perfect and voice quality is quite good.

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Linphone has a version for Windows as well as for AppleIphone mobile phone.

For console geeks, there is also a command tool interface to linphone linbphonec;

$ linphonec Warning: Could not start UDP transport on port 5060, maybe this port is already used. Ready Warning: video is disabled in linphonec, use -V or - or -D to enable. linphonec> linphonec> help Commands are: ------help Print commands help call Call a SIP uri chat Chat with a SIP uri terminate Terminate the current call answer Answer a call autoanswer Show/set auto-answer mode

4 / 6 Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Articles & tips and tricks on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, mobile phone articles, religious related texts http://www.pc-freak.net/blog proxy Manage proxies soundcard Manage soundcards Manage staticpic Manage static pictures when nowebcam Use IPV6 refer Refer the current call to the specified destination. nat Set nat address stun Set stun server address firewall Set firewall policy call-logs Calls history friend Manage friends play play from a wav file record record to a wav file quit Exit linphonec register Register in one line to a proxy unregister Unregister from default proxy duration Print duration in seconds of the last call. status Print various status information ports Network ports configuration speak Speak a sentence using espeak TTS engine codec Audio codec configuration vcodec Video codec configuration ec Echo cancellation mute Mute microphone and suspend voice transmission. unmute Unmute microphone and resume voice transmission. nortp-on-a Set the rtp_no_xmit_on_audio_mute configuration parameter ------Type 'help ' for more details. linphonec> quit

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Another great thing about Linphone is it is licensed under license GPL2 - meaning source is publicly accessible - thus anyone with skills and desire to port it to any computer architecture can do it. I did not have time to test it throughfully with newer version of linphone to know if Video calls works fine - whether same program versions are used between both peer sides, nevertheless for anyone willing non M$ sniffed channel to do voice calls between Computers linphone is nice.

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