IP Telephony Revisited
I did another round of IP Telephony experiments (the first one was looong time ago, even before aKademy. Admittedly, skype works pretty much out of the box, which is nice, but it doesn’t change anything on the fact that skype is non-free and thus not in very good position with me. However, there is a less-known alternative, which looks pretty promising. That being SIP phones, like the opensource kphone. However, SIP phone alone is not enough, you need an operator. I use FWD which seems to work flawlessly. They have an easy howto and they, if nothing else, know about kphone. Also they have a STUN server if you haven’t get a public IP (that’s one checkbox in kphone…).
I only had one problem with kphone, and that was microphone setup. The problem was, ALSA has veeeeeeery stupid capture/microphone settings. So it took me about half an hour to get it up. How intuitive. I recall i spent considerable time with similar problem once already. Please, someone fix alsa or something. This totally sucks. And this is why i hate linux (yeah, i use it everyday, but i still hate it… it’s not beautiful and even less nice). Interesting part was, mic in skype worked out of the box. I’m wondering how they do it…
Greetings to danalien from #slicker =).
PS: Yeah, kphone is a bit crashy… And not very UI-polished or anything. It definitely needs some love. So if anyone has an itch, it’d be nice if you could show to the skype guys how is it done ;-). I’m looking forward to the next k3b and amarok in the opensource KDE VoIP solution, whatever the name…