Any soft phone / softphone?

jamapii · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 580

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.
_________________
Sergey Okhapkin
http://www.callwithus.com

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6332

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: 1029

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

Massimo B. · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1579 Location: Germany

jamapii · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 580

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 · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 580

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. · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1579 Location: Germany

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