OpenWengo releases the WengoPhone 2.1 rc1
March 9, 2007 10:27 am marketing, openwengoI won’t make a habit of announcing software releases on my blog, but this is an important one – the first release since I’ve been at Wengo that I’ve been involved with.
And since this is the first that most of you will have heard of OpenWengo, allow me to show you around.
OpenWengo is an umbrella project – a community of people working to make great cross-platform free software for communication over IP. From the beginning, we have used open standards to ensure interoperability (even though that’s not quite so easily done as that). We use the SIP protocol for VoIP and video calls, and have integrated libgaim (a part of gail) to allow us to handle a range of IM protocols (we also support SIP/SIMPLE, which is SIP’s messaging and presence extension).
Assane on the videophone
Update: Especially for Paul Cooper (hi Coop) here’s a link to some screenshots.
This release is the first one that I can encourage people to use on Linux – previous releases have had a number of known blocker issues with certain types of hardware. In this release we have fixed literally hundreds of bugs and hardware compatibility issues, and I am now quite happily using the WengoPhone every day for my VoIP and messaging needs. We still have some known issues which need to be resolved for 2.1.0, but we’re well on track.
The release is available here, and a more complete release announcement is here. Bug reports and feedback can be sent to us via the OpenWengo wiki & bug tracker (yes, we use trac, and are overall pretty happy with is, aside from one or two performance issues).
One major black spot on this release, though: translations. We use Launchpad (or more specifically Rosetta) for translations – we convert our .ts files to .pos, then convert back to update the translations for releases.
But since Feisty’s translations opened a couple of weeks ago, there were around 40,000 files awaiting import – and I don’t know what Rosetta does to import a .po file, but it is taking ages. That queue (correction) has 10,000 files which are approved and awaiting importation and my imports (which I requested 10 days ago) are now around 1000th (correction: 10,500th) in the queue. So unfortunately, for the moment, I have no way to let translators start working on the translations for 2.1 on Rosetta, and I had no way of getting existing translations merged from another branch and committed for the 2.1 release.
If we don’t manage to resolve our problems with Rosetta (we were badly bitten in the ass with a Rosetta bug with uploaded .po files last year too), we’re going to have to go back to an old reliable solution, and just get people to use qtlinguist. Which would be a pity, since I like opening up the translation to people who don’t have a full development environment installed, and having a few approved translators who integrate their work.
March 9th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
You can’t announce something like this and not include screenshots, or to be honest, what all the cool kids do nowadays, a screencast!
March 9th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
If lauchpad gives to much trouble with the translation, you might want to look at alternative web based translation solutions. I don’t really know the names of the others, but i read that some debian developers and people from other groups are working at similar solutions like launchpad for translation, so if you leave launchpad, there’s maybe a more friendly alternative than qtlinguist.
March 10th, 2007 at 12:25 am
I would have rolled out WengoPhone instead of Gizmo Project at our office if it wasn’t for the bug I reported that makes Wengo not functioning in a Windows SBS 2003 domain environment.
http://forum.wengophone.com/viewtopic.php?t=4555
It’s a shame though, because I much prefer open source software to closed proprietary (although Gizmo at least uses open communication standards).
March 10th, 2007 at 2:28 am
Hi David,
I just answered your question on the forums – it seems that bug was put into our trac and fixed in this release.
March 10th, 2007 at 3:19 am
I’ve long ago decided to refuse to translate anything that requires Rosetta. It’s just too frustrating to work with. A couple of fellow Dutch translators who I know, think alike.
March 10th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Thank you very much for the update. I wish I’d known about this a month ago and I wouldn’t have rolled out Gizmo. Right now we’re in a mess because we’ve paid for Gizmo Out.
If there’s a smooth way of using the Wengo client with the Gizmo service, I’d switch client in an instant. I was able to successfully login with the SIP account, but chat (Jabber?) wasn’t working.
March 11th, 2007 at 12:41 am
You shouldn’t be using Trac through CGI this is slow has hell, use FCGI or Mod_python instead + Apache for static (which I guess you’re already doing), really !
And if you’re using sqlite, replacing it by Posgresql or MySQL could help as well as it is known to leak memory in some deployment case. For some version of Trac coupled with some version of sqlite, I don’t remember which.
March 15th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Hey Dave,
I’m sorry that the Feisty queue held up OpenWengo translations. It’s no good for us to have such a long period where Launchpad Translations is useless for anyone wanting to import templates.
I know that you’ve spoken to Carlos and Danilo in the Launchpad team, but I’d like to let everyone else know that this problem will be fixed in time for Feisty+1.
We’re going to create a separate import queue for each project and distribution that uses Launchpad Translations. That way, no single import can hold up everyone else.
Again, I’m sorry you’ve had a crap experience. Thanks for letting us know what a pain it’s been.
Matthew.