Any soft phone / softphone?

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

Hello

I remember a long time ago, there were many soft phones / softphones.

Now it seems, for gentoo, officially there is no such thing.

What comes close:

- linphone, from an overlay, bzrtp does not compile and seems broken, binary version hard to install
- empathy, probably not a soft phone, probably unmaintained, unclear if it works at all
- zoiper, expensive
- ekiga, historic, just a mask is left
- sflphone, historic, just a mask is left
- wine (and install some Windows thing)

Is there any good solution that is reasonably quick to install and use?

thanks

sokhapkin · Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 2:14 am Post subject:

I compiled Linphone 4.X from git, didn't find a good alternative.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

net-voip/blink (in overlay) looks like it might be a good one. The ebuild's two releases behind, upstream last updated in February.

Elleni · Veteran Joined: 23 May 2006 Posts: 1289

Jitsi might be worth a look, although only available via overlay

Massimo B. · Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2019 7:33 am Post subject:

There is also telepathy with USE=sip.
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jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

Telepathy is actually an interesting example.

What is it? There is no command and nothing else that you can do anything with that is named telepathy.

With lots of exploring /var/db/pkg/*/*/CONTENTS (done this very long ago) I come up with empathy.

What is this? It looks like a messenger, just visually. It's probably a mockup of what an instant messenger used to look like. There is a text "You have no contacts", a greyed out "Add contact", an "Away" "Available" etc selector and a "Set away message" that even pops up something - I didn't bother to try typing anything.

What is notable is that it is nowhere near being a messenger, or anything that does anything at all. No menus, no "Add account".

So I guess, that is too user-unfriendly for Gnome? Maybe you must explore all the menus that can be reached from the desktop, and start from there, and it will do something?

So let's close it. There is a menu item "Empathy". Let's try it. Wow! The same piece of Nothing again.

So i wonder, what is this at all?

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

I tried -- blink --, I guess it looks promising, but is not easy to compile. I think that was my attempt to compile something where all distfiles were missing, and I got halfway through getting some dependencies installed anyway.

I installed a lot of distributions in virtual machines, and found a single distribution that still has a SIP client.

This is -- CentOS -- with -- ekiga --

I will come back to this someday ...

Massimo B. · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 5:14 am Post subject:

As I remember that we had gnomemeeting in the past on Gentoo, I wondered why ekiga is missing and did some research. There I found this:
http://ekiga.1756082.n4.nabble.com/Ekiga-is-dead-according-to-Gentoo-td4657533.html
https://bugs.gentoo.org/627868

skaumo · n00b Joined: 07 May 2013 Posts: 6

Twinkle could make its way back, now that it has been updated to Qt5:

http://twinkle.dolezel.info/

Banana · Posted: Tue May 05, 2020 8:43 am Post subject:

whats about kphone?
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MarioCorleone · Guru Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 336

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BM-W · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2023 12:54 pm Post subject: Twinkle!

I would like to support skaumo's suggestion to bring twinkle onboard the Gentoo world. Years ago it was the only SIP app that worked (here in Germany). How and where can I ask for someone to create a Gentoo package?
Thanks for someone supporting this.
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flexibeast · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2023 10:17 pm Post subject: Re: Twinkle!

pa4wdh · l33t Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 892

Quite some time ago (~2018/2019) i've been using linphone and i'm still looking for an alternative. WebRTC seems like a good one, but is broken when combined with alsa (https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1168359-highlight-webrtc.html).

I see a few alternatives i'd like to share/discuss, I haven't tried them yet.
asterisk with chan_console: Basically you can use asterisk as a phone using a speaker, microphone and the CLI. Probably you'll need a nice GUI for a phone-like experience, but all the (heavy) sip/rtp work is done by asterisk.
XMPP: XMPP has similar capabilities and the availability of XMPP clients (pidgin for example) is better than SIP clients. ejabberd seems like an XMPP server which integrates nicely with asterisk.

Has anyone tried such a setup?
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