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!
What others “commercial VOIP thingies” use SIP or other protocols handled by ekiga ? Will Ekiga be able to communicate with skype for exemple ?
skype is proprietary, but there are lots of other SIP implementations, both in software and hardware.