How to use other voip sip softphones than skype in linux

[Tony Pursell]

On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 06:27 +0000, user1 wrote:
> I am skyping with a friend who has windows xp and I am using lucid.
> 
> The video and sound is often broken so the conversation is often 
> difficult to follow.
> 

I've had that with Skype in the past, but its OK now.

> Then I tried aMSN and it tells that it will not do video.
> 

Trouble is that Microsoft pulled the plug on the old server based
Messenger and left only the peer to peer Live service running.  The
telepathy-butterfly people have been working hard and the news is that
they have got AV running again.  It will be in 10.10.  You don't need
aMSN because Empathy, Ubuntu's default IM client, will do it.

> Then I tried linphone and the sound did not work.
> 
> Then I tried Ekiga and could not make it work.
> 
> Then I tried Kphone and that I could not make to work.

I don't know much about these, although I did try Ekiga a long time ago
and did a test call.

> 
> So now I am back to skype.
> 

Me too for the moment.  My brother and I meet up on MSN chat (he in
Windows Live Messenger and me in Empathy) then switch to Skype to see
and talk to each other.

> Any good experience of using another softphone which is as easy to setup 
> as skype and which works well?
> 

As someone else has said there is the Gmail (GTalk) option.  There are
browser plugins for Linux (Firefox) and Windows (IE and Firefox).  And
Emapthy also does GTalk. My experience, using the browser plugins, is
that it's poor (like your Skype), and there seems to be a problem if I
use Empathy and the other side is using the browser plugin.

There is also Jabber which supports AV and is supported in Empathy.  My
own limited trials show this works well but I don't know much about
Windows clients for Jabber and if they support AV.

> It has to be easy to setup so even newbies can use it :-)
> 
> 

As you may guess, I am an AV chat fan and want to see Ubuntu come good
in this respect.  Its been one of the things it has been lacking for the
ordinary user.  I think Empathy is the way to go.  It is an all-in-one
solution, so once you get familiar with it, you can easily set up all
sorts of IM services.

Tony