Re: FLOSS VOIP Client Software

I am trying to look for a decent FLOSS VOIP software that allows me to communicate to Windows/Mac users. Skype is out of the question since it does not even support Debian PPC (which I have).

I have heard of Ekiga. How is that?

Hi, Amit

I too want to find a definite solution for this. I can just let you
know my experiences with some software I tried to talk with my
girlfriend, who uses Vista:

-Ekiga. It certainly looks a nice option, but last time we tried (just
over 3 months ago) the windows version wasn't very solid and we had to
drop it. More over, it has loads of Gnome dependencies, which may, or
may not, be a problem for you.
-OpenWengo. Nice but trickier (just slightier) to get up and running,
if I remember correctly, and the sound quality WE got wasn't as good
as, say, Skype.
-Kopete. Running this on my Debian machine it was straithforward to
talk (and video conference too) with her using MSN. For this it uses
some reverse engineered library so it still is FLOSS. The same about
the libraries applies here, but for KDE. Our choice so far.

When we tried this she was abroad using a hall Uni network, and due to
a lack of planning I couldn't put my hands on her computer before she
was already there, so we were constrained to try the easiest solutions
we could think of. With more time and full control of you and your
friends' networks I guess you can obtain better results and even try
other ones, like Linphone.

Does that work with Windows/Mac users using Skype clients?

You can't talk with Skype users using anything but Skype. Kopete has
an addon to do this, but it's just a workaround that launches a Skype
instance and puts Kopete on top of it; I haven't even bothered:

http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kopete%20skype/

A good while ago somebody claimed to have reverse engineered Skype
protocol, but I heard nothing afterwards. If you find a good solution
do let me know!


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