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Friday, December 7, 2012

Ekiga Open Source Softphone like Skype - Ekiga 4.0 aka "The Victory Release" available! Ekiga Free Your Speech

I've used Ekiga, in the past. But, I never really did allot of Chatting or Internet Voice Calling before. So, I can't really remember how it was to use. What I was really interested in was, setting up a Softphone with SIP Support. So that I could call regular Land Lines through the Internet. But, setting up and running your own Server on Asterisk or an App like that. Can be really Complicated. I have found a few Linux Distros with Asterisk and such. All Setup and ready to go, for the most part. But, that requires a Dedicated Machine and one of fairly new Hard ware and Memory Requirements. And I don't have a newer machine to spare. I'm still using a 1.8GHz Core 2 and a Pentium 4, as my main Machines. I have some P3 and older Machines. But they will not suffice for a GUI version of Asterisk. And I don't want to mess around with a Command Line only Asterisk System. Takes too much time and there is a learning curve there for me. So, why not just use a nice little App, like Ekiga? I have actually been using Skype for Linux lately, to talk to someone Over Seas. So, now my interest in Chat Apps has been renewed. Check out what's new in Ekiga...

Don

Ekiga 4.0.0 stable is out: (2012-11-26, release notes)

Installing Ekiga on Linux

For GNU/Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris and other Unix-like systems.

Installing Ekiga on Windows

For Microsoft® Windows and ReactOS®

Download:

Ekiga is a software phone and video conferencing application. It allows you to hear and see your friends for free using your computer and Internet. You can also chat with them and see if they are online or not. It has many other features. It works on GNU/Linux and Windows.

More specifically, Ekiga is a VoIP, IP Telephony, and Video Conferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with SIP or H.323 compatible hardware and software. It supports many audio and video codecs and all modern VoIP features for both SIP and H.323. Ekiga is the first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP, as well as audio and video. Ekiga was formerly known as GnomeMeeting.

See press coverage for mentions of Ekiga in the press.

Documentation

Ekiga 4.0 aka "The Victory Release" available!

Submitted by dsandras on Tue, 11/27/2012 - 09:16

The legendary Linux softphone is back for more!

Three years after the 3.2 release, Ekiga 4.0 aka "The Victory Release" is finally available.

This is a major release with many major improvements.

Where to get it ?

Ekiga sources and Windows binaries are available at:
http://www.ekiga.org/download-ekiga-binaries-or-source-code

Required librairies can be found at:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/opal/3.10/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ptlib/2.10/

Here is the list of changes

New Features and Improvements:

Completely new user interface with improved roster, separate call window and improved chat window and accounts window
Fixes in the call history
Themeable icons
Better GNOME 3 integration with improved notifications and tray icon removal
Add a new assistant page with an introduction to accounts
Reduced startup time
New PulseAudio plugin
New audio codecs: SILK (used by skype), G.722.1 (aka Siren 7), G.722.2 (aka GSM-AMR Wide band)
Video codecs changes: H.264 optimisations
Added RTP TOS support
Call auto-answer
Partial support for handling multiple video streams (H.239)
Improve audio accuracy on some audio cards
Various usability fixes:
- hitting enter in the roster will trigger a call,
- added mnemonics to various parts of the UI,
- improved Enter key usage in chat (use shift-Enter for soft Enter),
- optimized UI for small screens,
- added several tooltips
Improved notifications when detecting a new audio device
Converted many dependencies as plugins: evolution-data-server, avahi, ldap, ...
Many fixes in the experimental Jabber/XMPP and GStreamer plugins
Fixes in the LDAP plugin
Several HIG strings related fixes
Updated manual

SIP Support

Various SIP interoperability fixes
Added SIP Service-Route header support (RFC 3608)
Various SIP/SIMPLE presence related fixes
Fixed registration to broken registrars
Unregister all accounts on quit
Publish offline presence on quit
Refresh NAT bindings with SIP OPTIONS requests
Support for DNS SRV caching

Various Build Fixes

Add arm-linux-gnueabihf (armhf) and GNU/Hurd support
Fixed modern FreeBSD compilation
Added support for recent evolution-data-server, GTK 2.x, OPAL, PTLIB, libavcodec, libx264, libnotify libraries, autoconf and removed deprecated methods
Moved from sigc++ to boost

Windows Port Fixes

Support mingw-w64 and its own headers for building the WIN32 release
Allow execution from Start->Execute menu
Reduced startup time

Read More...
http://www.ekiga.org/news/2012-11-27/ekiga-4.0-aka-victory-release-available

Ekiga Softphone Features

Main Features of the Ekiga Softphone in a nutshell Version 4.0

Ease of use with a modern Graphical User Interface
Audio and Video free calls through the internet
Free Instant Messaging through the internet with Presence support
Audio (and video) calls to landlines and cell phones with support to the cheapest service providers
High Definition Sound (wideband) and Video Quality up to DVD quality (high framerate, state of the art quality codec and frame size)
Free of choice of the service provider
SMS to cell phones if the service provider supports it (like the default provider)
Standard Telephony features support like Call Hold, Call Transfer, Call Forwarding, DTMF
Remote and Local Address Book support: Remote Address Book support with authentification using the standard LDAP technology, Local Address support in Gnome (Evolution)
Multi platform: Windows and GNU/Linux
Wide interoperability: Ekiga use the main deployed stantards for telephony protocols (SIP and H.323) and has been tested with a wide range of softphones, hardphones, PBX and service providers