Speakerphone for Ubuntu 8.10?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 09:24:31AM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> According to one person's opinion. It works fine for me. I've used it to 
> call phones in Canada from India and Egypt for 2?? per minute and I've 
> used it for truly global conference calls on a frequent basis. Its sound 
> quality is better than any other VOIP system I've tried. And ... most 
> importantly .. the people I want to talk to are already registered 
> there. The communities of Wengo and Gizmo users are orders of magnitude 
> smaller.

It doesn't matter that it works.  It is still an awful design.  Many
other programs (with a lot less propaganda and advertizing) work much
better.

> No new skype upgrade has ever diminished my ability to use it. OTOH, 
> upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 from 8.04 has broken my ability to use certain 
> microphones for *any* application.

ALSA can be a pain, and some distributions seem to jump on the latest
sound daemon bandwagon a bit too often (artsd was annoying and broke
stuff, esd was annoying and broke stuff, I am sure pulseaudio is going
to do the same).

> I too prefer open source and standard-based systems. And when there's a 
> SIP alternative that does what I need and doesn't suck more -- and 
> heavens knows I've tried many -- I'll be happy to switch. But for now 
> I'll gladly go on the record as saying that the latest Ubuntu platform 
> has created more obstacles to my use of VOIP than Skype has. The 
> hyper-complexity of ALSA is a perfect example of the open source world 
> *still* not understanding what most people need from an operating system 
> platform.

So far I use ekiga which is sip based and works very well.  Simple to
use, likes the usb headsets that people seem to have issues with, works
with webcams just fine.  Has a nice windows version that is easy to
install too.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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