At last!

Daniel Veillard built the ekiga beta (ekiga is basically GnomeMeeting 2.0) in rawhide yesterday, so I decided to try it out. For the longest time I’ve thought GnomeMeeting was a really cool idea, but whenever I tried to actually use it I’d alway fail due to some firewall issue. (I have a pretty standard setup with a Linksys WRT54 broadband router as firewall.)

Not so this time!

It was incredibly smooth to set up, even autodetecting how to avoid NAT problems. The only manual thing I had to do was to enable the top secret “+20dB mic boost” setting in the volume control. I tried calling various echo servers on the net, which worked fine. Then I called caolan, who just got a “commercial VOIP thingie”. Worked immediately! Maybe the firewall handling got better, or maybe SIP is just easier to get through firewalls. I don’t care, and I don’t have to, it just works!

The integration with the free ekiga.net service and its central address book really makes this much more usable. Hats of to Damien!

2 thoughts on “At last!”

  1. What others “commercial VOIP thingies” use SIP or other protocols handled by ekiga ? Will Ekiga be able to communicate with skype for exemple ?

  2. skype is proprietary, but there are lots of other SIP implementations, both in software and hardware.

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