Ekiga

Ekiga won last week one of the Free Software Awards in Soissons (France). Ekiga was nominated in the "Multimedia" category.

The jury appreciated the quality of the project and the fact that it was original (GnomeMeeting was the first Open Source GUI to support VoIP together with video and the H.323 standard on GNU/Linux in 2001). It is now the first Open Source application to support multiple major VoIP protocols at the same time, again with audio and video.

It is a very good news for that mature and inovative GNOME project. That prize rewards the developers for their hard work during the last 6 years.

The Truth

Ekiga is a mature program that successfully does the job. It doesn't have alot of fancy features but it has all the useful stuff. A PC-to-Phone Account can be created and I think this should sponsor the project enough to keep it updated. Considering also the large availability of other similar software I can say that this software does pretty well and it's on the top of my list, performing better than Linphone and kphone.
Review Ekiga 2.0

We celebrate this week the 5th birthday of the Ekiga project.

Ekiga is the first Open Source software to bring both Voice over IP/IP Telephony and video conferencing to the desktop, since 2001. It quickly became popular, among others thanks to the compatibility with the Netmeeting software.

Today, Ekiga has evolved into a mature and stable product which is not limited to Netmeeting anymore, in terms of compatibility. This was made possible thanks to the addition of another protocol, namely SIP.

But this is not the end of the story.You will find here a retrospective of the key points of the history of Ekiga.

In this story the Linux Journal takes a look at current VOIP offerings on Linux including Ekiga, a GNOME based H.323 and SIP client, which comes out on top!

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Ekiga 2.00 is finally out! Today's announcement represents one year of relentless work. Just a reminder to everyone that Ekiga is now the first Open Source software to support both SIP and H.323 in the same application. Ekiga previously known as GnomeMeeting was already a pioneer among the Open Source Voice over IP softphones. Let's hope Ekiga will continue in this way!

After more than one year of active development, GnomeMeeting has reborn on the form of Ekiga.

Ekiga is a SIP and H.323 application, supporting audio and video, and is the successor of GnomeMeeting.
The first BETA release is available on http://www.ekiga.org.

Among the features, you can find:

* Call Forwarding on busy, no answer, always (SIP and H.323)
* Call Transfer (SIP and H.323)
* Call Hold (SIP and H.323)
* DTMFs support (SIP and H.323)
* Basic Instant Messaging (SIP)
* Text Chat (SIP and H.323)
* Possibility to register registrars (SIP) and to gatekeepers (H.323)

Two interviews of Damien Sandras, author of GnomeMeeting and one of the organizers of FOSDEM, have recently been published on the Journal du Net and on the O'Reilly network.

You can learn more about the views of the author about the future of GnomeMeeting as a professionnal VoIP application, respecting protocols and standards and most notably soon SIP, but also about his conception of things "do one thing but do it well" for the project. You can also read about the new features of GnomeMeeting 1.2 and what you can expect in the future. There will be big changes.

You can read the Journal du Net interview (in french) and the O'Reilly Network interview (in english).

Newsforge is running an interesting article about GnomeMeeting. GnomeMeeting is not just videoconferencing, it is also VoIP with H.323, but also soon with SIP. It is certainly a "must have" nowadays.

After a few months of work, GnomeMeeting 1.2 is ready to be released. This new release has required a lot of work and of polishing, and it will most probably be the last release to support only H.323. The next release should also support SIP, and you can expect BETA releases soon.

GnomeMeeting 1.2 has many new features, including the ability to share your contacts between GnomeMeeting and Novell Evolution 2.00. Another big new feature is the possibility to do PC-To-Phone calls at interesting rates using only your soundcard, no extra hardware is required. Please see the FAQ for more information about PC-To-Phone calls. We have to finally mention that GnomeMeeting 1.2 supports STUN and is easier to configure to go through NAT routers that do not support H.323.

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The first official release of the open-source alternative to Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) NetMeeting PC videoconferencing software has just rolled out of GnomeMeeting.org, the small open source group.

Version 1.0 of the GnomeMeeting software package is a H.323 videoconferencing application for Linux PCs that allows users to make audio and video calls over the Internet, as long as recipients are equipped with H.323-compatible equipment. (H.323 (define) is a set of communications protocols used to transmit and receive audio and video information over the Internet.)

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We, the FrontSITE staff, have arranged a local event (In Turkish) to motivate the Gnome-Turk team, encourage more people to get involved with GNOME development and promote free software. Enjoy! ;-)

As seen on PCLO, a GnomeMeeting user chronicles his experiences in setting up GnomeMeeting with a Quicknet card to be able to lower his phone bills.

Of course I use email most of the time, but you know how human nature is, from time to time we need to hear a friendly voice, it gives you warm feelings...then you pick up your phone and your phone bills start to increase and your wallet heads the opposite direction..... The good thing about this solution is to give you a way to simply connect a normal phone set (or cordless phone) and use it like a normal phone. I can plug in my cordless phone and can talk for cheap with no need to stay put at my computer!

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GnomeMeeting 0.96.1 is available for download today at the usual
location. This is a minor bugfix release but it also contains a few
improvements.

Press Release:
SAN FRANCISCO, California - February 5, 2003 - Quicknet
Technologies, the leading provider of end-to-end voice, fax and
video IP telephony solutions and technologies for Linux today
announced the first Linux commercial PC-to-Phone supported
service for Linux users in concert with GnomeMeeting.Org.

Read the press release

GnomeMeeting is a GNU/Linux H.323 compatible client. It is compatible with Netmeeting and other H.323 products. It's licensed under the GNU/GPL, which means the source code is open. You can download GnomeMeeting for free on http://www.gnomemeeting.org. It's written by Damien Sandras , who answers our questions about GnomeMeeting in the interview below.

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