Linux voice chatting

Tuesday, 09 September 2003

I had decided it is almost impossible to do voice chatting easily with Linux, until I was chatting with the creator of GAIM via Yahoo Chat (I think), and he said in the future GAIM would probably support it, but in the meantime I should try out NetMeeting on the Windows side, and GnomeMeeting on the Linux side.

I have to say I am impressed. Though, not with upgrading my Redhat 8.0 default GnomeMeeting. I hate dependency blah blah blah blahs. So I just downloaded like 6 different rpms, and hope I can satisfy them all. Is there a better way to do this? Be sure to leave a comment if you have nifty tips on this problem.

Oh… and I finally found out if you want to run NetMeeting on Windows XP… click on Start > Run, and then type in conf.exe. This will allow you to run it on Windows. I probably will never know how anyone figured that one out…

Yeah, so I expect to talk with Venezuela soon via free Linux. Hopefully the 56k modem will withstand the heat of zipping off 1’s and 0’s down to South America. I chatted with a dude from Texas tonight. It was okay, but quite a bit of interruptions… and that after he turned off his webcam. Before he shut the video down, it was like a slow motion video, and a little bit of broken audio every 30 seconds.

It’s definitely time for cheaper and more widespread broadband…

Oh, don’t really look for voice chatting anywhere else on Linux… unless you want to play around with Gyach Enhanced. By the way, be prepared to learn Python if you are serious about trying this out. There’s another one out there developed for Windows but says it will work with WINE. I can’t… and don’t want to remember the name. Unfortunately it only displays with Wingdings on my WINE setup. I could either figure out the font thing, which I played with until nearly 3am lastnight, or learn to read in Wingdings.

Hence the reason I fell back on GnomeMeeting.