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Content Tagged with weblog + Ekiga
Ekiga Snapshots Resurrected
Thank to Eugen Dedu and Yannick Defais, we now have again packages allowing easy testing of our bleeding edge Ekiga.
Thank you to Kilian for having maintained them during all those years…
Check them out:
http://snapshots.ekiga.net.
It includes Debian Unstable (i386 and amd64) and Ubuntu Hardy and Gutsy
(i386 and amd64).
Those packages feature the presence indicator, new and advanced video
codecs, a roster like you can find in most Instant Messenger clients, a
quality indicator, an easier setup and many other things.
Last but not least, we have hidden many bugs to hunt here and there!
Please, be kind enough to help us test and improve the software.
Interview published
Free Software Magazine published a long interview of the main Ekiga developers and contributors.
It gives a deeper insight of what Ekiga is, what it will become, how we are working together. I think it is always good to remember that Ekiga is a pure collaborative project, on which people program during their spare time only, without any funding unlike much free software nowadays.
Enjoy the reading and big thanks to Tony Mobily for the time spent with us for this interview!
Linuxtag
Many people seem to be going at LinuxTag.
I’ll be giving a talk at the event this Saturday.
If you want to see more about Ekiga 3.00, feel free to join in Saal Paris.
I will present Ekiga in general, SIP, Ekiga 3.00 and what we can expect from the future. I also hope there will be no problem with the VPN connection at the office to do a short demo of Ekiga used with Asterisk.
MacBook Pro fixed
Important decision
The Ekiga developers team just took an important decision concerning the future of Ekiga… Let’s hope it will have a good impact on the project!
Update: That was of course an April Fool.
Misc News
FOSDEM
I went to FOSDEM for the first year as a simple visitor. After several years spent organizing the event and making it grow to one of the major hackers event in the world, I can only tell that I am satisfied of the accomplished work. FOSDEM is still getting bigger and bigger and the community part is gaining importance over other aspects.
CEBit
This year was also my first CEBit. I was quite surprised to meet Julien at the airport. It was a pretty interesting show. The most important part probably happened when discussing with colleagues, because we had pretty interesting ideas.
Ekiga 3.00
Ekiga 3.00 is moving quite quickly thanks to the hard work of its contributors. We are not that far of a production ready BETA of Ekiga 3.00. I spent part of this week-end improving the roster, but also the general look of Ekiga 3.00.
I decided to put the video next to the roster and dialpad. It does not look like other VoIP software, but I think it is a more convenient approach because it allows using the dialpad and the roster (to transfer calls or establish new calls in future releases) while being in a call.
I am not sure if it will be a popular or unpopular move, but here are two screenshots. Feel free to post comments.
Without video:
With video, while being in a call:
Thank you so much Apple
Thank you so much for having published broken firmware updated.
I had no problems with my Macbook Pro running Linux, until I decided to update to the EFI 1.4 firmware.
This firmware was supposed to fix keyboard problems when booting. That problem was not particularly annoying, but I thought that upgrading the EFI firmware would not do any harm. Apple does not warn against any potential problems.
However, after the upgrade, MacbookPro core 2 duo 17″ laptops are broken under Windows and under Linux. The video is corrupt and some colours can not be displayed correctly anymore.
Apparently, Apple does not care about it at all, they even blacklisted some threads in their discussion forums talking about that specific problem.
There are other lenghty discussions.
There is no fix for that problem, and no firmware update since last September. Complaints from users are being ignored.
What can I do ? Ask my employer to buy me a new laptop ?
That’s not serious, it is probably the first and the last time I buy anything from Apple.
Update: It seems the radeonhd driver largely attenuates the problem compared to the proprietary fglrx. It means no 3D, but I don’t need it.
Status Report
Ekiga
Life has been hectic lately, however, I progressed well on my work on the Ekiga engine.
I finished the design concerning the part of the engine handling calls (other parts like contacts and presentities are already functional mainly thanks to Julien). We now have a nice abstraction layer for OPAL. That new abstraction layer means that we can add as many Call Managers as we want (and not only OPAL), but also that building new applications based on Ekiga will be trivial.
Matthias has been working a lot on the codecs stuff on his side and we now nearly have 100% SIP compliant codecs exchange, supporting media codecs options. The result is impressing and will land into SVN pretty soon.
NOVACOM
NOVACOM, the company I am working for is hiring. MULTITEL, the research center specialized in telecommunications that created our spin-off is also hiring.
Both companies are looking for talented C++ and Java developers, Linux Gurus, VoIP specialists, people knowing about Open Source software like Asterisk, or OpenSER.
If you want to work in a fun atmosphere with people loving what they are doing, and if you are ready to work in Mons (Belgium), feel free to e-mail me me your resume and I will dispatch it to the appropriate persons.
Trophées du libre
This week, I was jury at the Trophées du libre in Soissons. It allowed me to meet several people and to participate to the choice of the winner in the Games&Multimedia category.
I was sharing this difficult task with Louis Desjardins, Øyvind Kolås, and Olivier Saraja.
Everything went smoothly and it was an interesting experience.
Several News
Important Events
Important events happened during the month of October. First of all, Jonita and myself have been together 10 years, we celebrated the birthday on the 1st of October.
While we were celebrating it, Vincent, my colleague at NOVACOM announced me that his first daughter was born. On the 2nd of October, my friend David announced me that his second daughter was born.
New Chat Window
I spent my week-end working on various improvements in the chat window. The chat window now displays the status of the person you are talking to. Everything is managed through signals handled by sigc++, like the rest of the new Ekiga engine, which makes things very flexible.
You can start a chat from the address book, or from the roster, then remove the contact you are talking to from the roster, add it back, everything will still behave as expected.
Ekiga 2.0.11
Ekiga 2.0.11 has been released as part of GNOME 2.20. It should be one of the last releases before the 3.00 branch.
Details can be found on http://www.ekiga.org.
Enjoy.
Bye Bye FOSDEM
I have been thinking long about this and only found the courage to take my decision recently.
I have been involved with FOSDEM since the very first edition, back in 2000 when it was still named OSDEM.
I still remember when Raph gave me a phone call to ask me if I would agree to help him organizing a new Open Source event, but developers oriented.
It was a big challenge, but I accepted. The first edition was already a big success with more than 400 participants.
I have been involved in many areas of FOSDEM :
- on site organisation
- the main tracks programs
- contacts with the magazines and websites - for sponsorship and advertising -
- donation returns
- the folder
- …
However, I do not have enough time and enough passion anymore to devote to FOSDEM, but I am proud to have been part of the adventure since the beginning.
7 years to bring FOSDEM to what it is now : probably the best Open Source developers meeting in Europe.
However, it is now time to say goodbye…
Goodbye FOSDEM, it was great !
Trophées du libre
You probably remember that last year Ekiga won the Trophées du libre.
I am invited this year to be part of the Jury in the Multimedia section. I have accepted the invitation and will thus be present in Soissons for the ceremony.
I encourage every GNOME developer to submit his project before the 1st of October.
I think it is a good initiative from Cetril.
With 113 participants from 18 countries, it is one of the largest competitions organised to promote the spirit of Free Software to software users.
Thank you AMD
I am the happy owner of a Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo. It is a very nice laptop, but it has the big problem to overheat on Linux.
The reason is that the ATI Radeon card is always running at full power, which is obviously not required when you are doing only 2D and do not really need 3D (at least not all the time).
Until now, there was no way to lower the power usage of the card, and you had to live with the heat. But a patch was just released for radeontool.
That patch allows setting the card in lower power mode.
The result is longer battery life, but also far less heat.
This patch would not have been possible if the specs had not been released…
Re: about us…
Philip: Being a Walloon myself, I think that most Walloons care about Belgium, however they do not really care about the fact that Flemish people belong to the same country or not. So I would say that if we keep Brussels (which Flemish people would probably not like), Flemish people can go their own way with their own problems… 
However, I am always surprised when I see people talking about separatism based on the disinformation done by the media and the politics when everybody else is talking about Europe.
Something has to change
Something has to be done with regards to the integration of new GNOME developers into the community.
I will give here two examples illustrating why some people could become sick of contributing to the GNOME project.
More concretely, Ekiga has actually 2 developers contributing a lot to the project since the release of the SIP version.
One of them is Matthias Schneider, who has contributed a lot in various areas related to video. Thanks to him, we will have large resolutions working in Ekiga, accelerated display both on GNU/Linux and Windows, and we will also support new codecs like H.263+ and H.264, which are top of the notch in terms of codecs.
The other is Julien Puydt, a long time contributor to the project. In the past, he contributed to the support for audio and video devices plugins, as well as an abstraction layer for Ekiga in order to accelerate the Windows port. He is currently redesigning with myself core parts of Ekiga in order to abstract the engine from the GUI.
Matthias has asked for an SVN account to be able to commit his patches directly into our SVN instead of emailing them to me on a daily basis.
He first asked for this account in May, complained in early July, but also in August, and we are by now in September, and he still does not have his account activated. Perhaps having a model similar to the one used in gna would make the process faster.
Julien has created a blog to talk about his developments on Ekiga. He is a frequent poster, and I would rate his posts as good. He asked for his
blog to be added to http://planet.gnome.org but was at best, ignored. As this person proposes it, I would suggest redefining the policy for being added to p.g.o.
Back to work
Welcome to Julien
Julien Puydt has finally decided to setup a blog on http://blogs.gnome.org. Julien is a long-time contributor to the Ekiga project. You can already read abstract nonsense about Vala and Ekiga. Julien explains GmConf that was introduced in GnomeMeeting a few years ago in order to provide an abstraction layer to GConf. The purpose of that abstraction layer was to have full GConf support on GNOME and Linux, but to be able to use other libraries (or our internal implementation) on other platforms like Windows where GConf is not ready for production use. All of this is transparent to the user.
The recent work of Julien will pave the way for the Ekiga Engine. We are abstracting most of our code into a new library that will allow to easily develop multi-protocols user agents. The purpose is to allow better modularisation of Ekiga in order to be able to easily add new features. The first part of his work has been done on contacts. We now have a new address book able to get contacts from LDAP, Evolution-Data-Server and KAddressbook in order to be able to add them in Ekiga’s brand new roster.
Julien, congratulations for Cyril btw!
New codecs in Ekiga
Matthias Schneider has nearly completed his work on codecs in Ekiga. Ekiga is now able to use codecs like H.263+, H.264 and MPEG-4 during SIP sessions. We have tested interoperability with a wide range of IP Phones and it seems his code behaves very well. The new plugins system available for audio and video codecs recently introduced in our library seems to help a lot in adding new and optional codecs.
Good review of Ekiga
Linux Magazine of this month concentrates on IP Telephony. The first part of the article teaches you what VoIP is and what it can achieve for you. This part is illustrated using Ekiga as an example of full-featured VoIP client. The second part of the article compares the various softphones available for Linux and Ekiga is very good rated and suggested to the reader as an easy to use and complete alternative to proprietary solutions.
Welcome to Steve
Steve Frécinaux recently joined our group at the office to work on various development projects mainly related to IP Telephony and VoIP. Steve has contributed a lot to gedit in the past, and is an active member of the GNOME community. You can read his blog here.
Happy Birthday
Today we celebrated the birthday of my wife Jonita, together with her parents.
Celebrating the birthday of Jonita also means celebrating the birthday of Ekiga !
The first release of Ekiga (named GnomeMeeting) happened 6 years ago. I am personaly developing on the project since the end of November 2000. I think it makes of Ekiga one of the oldest VoIP and videoconferencing project for GNU/Linux, and certainly the first one for the GNOME Desktop.
The GNOME project was still very young by that time. We brought significant new features and we were among the first projects to adopt early advanced GNOME technologies like GConf, Evolution-Data-Server, DBus…
What a long road !
Holidays
I am leaving in a few hours for the south of Spain to spend my holidays there with Jonita, I will be back in 3 weeks.
It means no GUADEC for me this year, unfortunately.
It is a pity, especially with the high number of new features I could have presented about Ekiga and OPAL.
Ekiga 2.00 was a little revolution, because the H.323 support was deprecated by the new SIP support and it took me a lot of time to achieve this.
Ekiga 3.00 will be the confirmation of that revolution with :
- more SIP features,
- SIP Presence support,
- a new user interface,
- a new Ekiga.net platform,
- accelerated video rendering,
- WIN32 support,
- a bunch of new codecs supported : H.263, H.264, MPEG-4, Theora, …
All of those new features have been developed by a team more dynamic than ever. It will be the release with the most external contributions since the project exists. New developers have joined the project, and you can believe me when I tell you they are producing high quality code…
Ekiga 3.00 is coming : “Get Ready For This!”
Misc News
DirectShow Support
I just committed the huge patch from Luc Saillard (from the PWC kernel module fame) to the SVN version of Ekiga. It means that the next release of Ekiga for Windows will have good support for video capture.
H.264 Plugin
Matthias Schneider has also contributed an H.264-compliant plugin for Ekiga. It gives excellent results in terms of video quality and bandwidth.
Ekiga 3.00
With new features like the SIP Presence support, the DirectShow plugin for the Windows version, and support for excellent video codecs like MPEG-4 or H.264, I think that Ekiga 3.00 will be a rocking release!
Let’s not forget IAX support from Stephen Cook which should be integrated soon.
VON Europe
I am heading to VON Europe with my colleagues tomorrow. I will be there until Thursday.
Relicensing Ekiga
We plan to contact all people having contributed to Ekiga or GnomeMeeting in the past provided their code is still being used.
You probably all know that GnomeMeeting was licensed under the GPL with a special exception allowing it to be linked with OpenH323 and PWLIB which are licensed under an incompatible license, GnomeMeeting was renamed into Ekiga and the exception was changed in order to allow it to be linked with OPAL.
It is not clear if changing the exception without contacting everyone was a good idea or not. We could argue that OPAL and OpenH323 are the same library, but the opposite is also true. Moreover, the exception applies to OPAL and PWLIB, but not to their plugins and you probably
know that PWLIB plugins to access the audio and video devices are also released under a GPL incompatible license (the MPL).
We would like to clarify the situation once for all. We have hesitated between updating the GPL exception or relicensing Ekiga under the LGPL.
The advantage of the second situation is that we do not have such conflicts arising anymore and our code is still well protected against
proprietary derivative works.
The final decision will be made public as soon as possible.
Presence Button
Yannick implemented a small script displaying the status information on Ekiga.net.
In order to use it, simply add this to your page :
<script src=”http://www.ekiga.net/status/presence.php?user=YOUR_ID_ON_EKIGA.NET”></script>
where YOUR_ID_ON_EKIGA_NET is simply your username :
(If you can not see how it looks like on the various planets, have a look at my blog directly.)
If you click on the button while the user is online, it should ask Ekiga to call the correct SIP address. This has been tested with Firefox, and it works well.
I would like to thank Yannick for this script, but also Vinicius Depizzol for the button (reusing well-known GNOME icons).
This work is a way to remind that Ekiga is a softphone, but also a platform for the community.
SIP Presence Support
SIP Presence
Ekiga 3.00 is progressing nicely.
I have recently committed the XVIDEO output plugin from Matthias Schneider together with a rewrite of the video display routines. Matthias recently proposed another plugin, specifically for the WIN32 release of Ekiga : DirectShow output. That work has been committed too.
I have just committed myself our latest code for SIP Presence Support. That work implements various RFCs : RFC3856, RFC3903, RFC3863, RFC3265, …
The result can be seen in the screenshot below. Basically, you are now able to see the status of your friends using standard SIP call flows with compliant SIP servers (this includes Asterisk). We will continue improving that code once we have more icons (jimmac, that is a desperate call for help).
The code has been contributed through my company NOVACOM thanks to Euroweb.
We are hiring, so if you feel like working with Free Software, in Belgium, feel free to e-mail me your resume.
Here is a screenshot (the GUI will still change a lot before we release 3.00).
RTP Support
XV patch finally committed
The excellent XV video display support code from Matthias Schneider has been committed tonight.
Matthias is already thinking to new improvements, so stay tuned for more !
I also did a rewrite of the pure GDK output to improve performances, which was an issue with SVN Trunk.
Ekiga 2.0.9
New release
We released a new version of Ekiga. It contains important bug fixes, but also, for the first time, a build for Windows with an easy to use installer.
This release is still marked as BETA, even if it is based on the same code as the classical Linux version. The reason is that we do not have support for DirectX yet. It is thus possible that it does not work with some webcams.
Ekiga 3.00 is also making nice progress.
Press
Many articles about Ekiga were published in the press the last 2 months :
- an article on Linux.com
- an article in GNU/Linux Magazine France
- an article in Linux Pratique
- an article in Linux Journal
It shows the big interest brought by the project, mainly since support for SIP was introduced. VocalScape also recently announced that they were stopping to support their own softphone and would be using Ekiga instead. They should also contribute back patches to the project.
FOSTEL
I was present at FOSTEL last week. The event was an interesting conference organized by our friend Dave. I discussed long with various people including Dodji, Craig, Hannes, Sean-Moss, Aymeric, Kilian, Nenad, … It was a good opportunity to meet other Open Source developers involved in VoIP or in other annex projects. It was also the opportunity to meet interesting people and to discuss about new projects. Dave, you really did a great job. Thanks !
Ekiga 2.0.7 available
New release
We released a new version of Ekiga just in time for the new GNOME release. It is not a major release, but it contains important bug fixes, including a security fix.
Ekiga 2.00 was released nearly one year ago and we can now tell from the various reports about Ekiga that the SIP support is mature and stable.
We continue working on Ekiga 3.00.
Paris
Tomorrow I will be in Paris with some of my NOVACOM colleagues. We will stay there until Tuesday evening.
We will be going to the VoIP convention on Tuesday.
FOSDEM 2007 over
FOSDEM 2007 is over
I was quite nostalgic this year at FOSDEM. It is actually the 7th time that I was involved in the organization of the event. I still remember when Raphaël gave me a phone call to ask me if I could help him organizing the first edition back in 2001. We expected around 40 visitors, and we got around 700, as I was involved in the promotion of the event, I think it proves I did a good job. Since the first edition, FOSDEM has grown into the main annual meeting of Open Source developers in Europe. We expect having attracted more than 4 500 visitors this year.
However, organizing the event is getting easier with time. The team is now bigger than ever and motivated people are helping in all areas of the organization. This year, I was only involved in coordinating the main tracks program and advertising in various magazines (as well as negotiating free subscriptions for donators). Those are the 2 tasks that I wanted to continue doing.
Each year, I wonder if it will be my last FOSDEM as an organizer or not. I am still thinking, but it is very possible that I won’t take part to the organization of FOSDEM 2008. Every good thing has an end. However, I am a bit sad when I think about the possibility of leaving, so perhaps it is not the right moment yet…
Here is the FOSDEM dance I created when being very tired after one of the previous editions :
Ekiga 2.0.5 released
Ekiga 2.0.5
We just released the 2.0.5 incarnation of Ekiga. It is not a specifically important upgrade, it is however worth it.
We also did a call for volunteers to ask for help in various areas of the project. That way, the current developers can concentrate on the code aspects, while others are helping in other areas of the project. If somebody is interested, feel free to leave a comment.
FOSDEM
One week before FOSDEM. FOSDEM will just be another great opportunity to meet talented hackers. We already published interviews of several developers who will be giving talks during the event:
* Jim Gettys (One Laptop Per Child)
* Aleksey Bragin (ReactOS)
* Federico Mena Quintero (Gnome, Profiling desktop applications)
* Øyvind Kolås (GEGL)
* Kristian Høgsberg (AIGLX)
* Ronald G Minnich (LinuxBIOS)
* Peter Saint-Andre (Jabber)
* Kern Sibbald (Bacula)
* Andrew Morton (Linux kernel)
* Joe Hewitt (Firebug)
* Georg Greve (FSFE)
* Pieter Hintjens (FFII, software patents)
* Tom Baeyens (JBoss BPM)
* H. D. Moore (Metasploit)
Floris really did a great job in finding interesting questions and contacting each and every speaker in order to get their answers.
Life
Life has been hard the last few weeks. The amount of work to do at NOVACOM is impressive. It means less and less spare time for Ekiga, family, and life in general. Fortunately, this week-end, Jonita and me decided to go to the Belgian coast in order to get some fresh air (wind and rain too).
Ekiga 2.0.4 availabe
Ekiga 2.0.4 ready
Ekiga 2.0.4 is available and contains many enhancements and fixes.
See the Ekiga website for more information.
FOSDEM
FOSDEM 2007 is approaching. We will have many interesting speakers presenting their projects in the main tracks, as usual. Georg Greve, Miguel (De Icaza), Federico (Mena Quintero), Peter Saint André, Jeremy Alisson, Keith Packard, Andrew Morton, Jim Gettys, Simon Phipps, and many others will be present during the week-end.
There will also be a GNOME Developers’ Room with a separate schedule and different presentations and tutorials than what you can have in the main track. It can be seen as a Belgian mini-GUADEC.
It is now time to check that page and propose a talk in order for the GNOME room to be one of the most successful developers’ rooms during the week-end.
Getting Ekiga 2.0.4 ready…
The patches fury
I spent a big part of the week-end backporting patches from OPAL HEAD to OPAL Phobos in order to get Ekiga 2.0.4 ready. In total, 63 patches were applied to the Phobos branch of OPAL. Those patches will improve the overall quality of Ekiga and allow it running several weeks without problem. However, I noticed that SIP reINVITE was broken recently.
SIP reINVITE is a mechanism implemented by Asterisk by which a running RTP session initiated through SIP can see its parameters being changed during the call. In short, 2 different phones initiate the call through Asterisk (with the RTP traffic going through the Asterisk server) and when the communication has been successfully established, Asterisk sends an INVITE PDU to each phone with new details in order to allow the RTP traffic to transit directly between the 2 IP Phones (possibly using different codecs).
The laboratory
Testing that reINVITE is fixed without having an Asterisk-based PBX and various IP Phones at home can be achieved in 5 steps :
- Establish a VPN connection with the office.
- Register Ekiga to the IPBX.
- Configure one of the IP Phones at work in Auto Answer mode, so that it automatically answers incoming calls.
- Call that phone, fix the bug. Notice that you are receiving audio, but there is nobody at work to talk to you or to make noise, so you do not know if the received audio is correct until you get a wonderful idea…
- Call the IP Phone of your colleague using your cellular. If you hear the phone ringing, then the received audio is correct.
Sometimes, getting things done right is not straightforward.
Retrospective of 2006
Better late than never, here is the retrospective of 2006 from the point of view of the Ekiga project.
2006 has been an important year for VoIP and IP Telephony:
- SIP has continued its steady growth. SIP is now being used in many big corporations (Bank of America, Boeing, …) thanks to IP Phones and softphones like Ekiga connected to new generation IPBXes (like the ones sold by NOVACOM). More and more ITSPs supporting SIP are appearing every day and giving the possibility of making very cheap phone calls. More and more softphones are being released in the proprietary world to compete with Skype, and they are also based on SIP. The world is moving to SIP. Any VoIP/IP Telephony application needs to support at least SIP in order to be taken seriously.
- Asterisk is getting more important in the telecom market and is helping to revolutionize the world of traditional telephony by bringing new and innovative features.
- A growing number of ISPs are proposing phone services based on SIP to home users.
2006 was also the year when the oldest VoIP/IP Telephony GNOME application celebrated its fifth birthday by bringing support for that new protocol named SIP: Ekiga 2.00 was released.
It was a major step forward for the project, for several reasons:
- H.323 was disappearing in favor of SIP
- More and more users were in the need of a reliable softphone for Linux, in order to be able to use it with their IPBX or with a national ISP or ITSP
- It proved that Free Software projects purely developed during the developers’ spare time can be successful: we had to add support for a completely new stack, supporting a brand new and complex protocol, and we only had limited time to do it during the evenings and week-ends. The results were very good: there were no specific stability problems, and the conformance to the protocol was not problematic either. Ekiga is now being used together with various providers, software and hardware without any problem. Moreover, the implementation of SIP is rather complete: advanced features like Call Transfer, Call Forwarding, Call Hold, Text Chat, In-Session renegotiation of codecs, Multiple Accounts Support were all available in the very first release.
- We got contacts with many big players. I cannot name all of them, but Ekiga will be used commercially by a famous manufacturer of microprocessors ; a big ITSP will propose an enhanced release of Ekiga with SIP Presence Support to its customers, on Win32 ; a big French telecom company is proposing it in a small terminal for people who never used a computer before, … All of them have contributed to the project in various ways and chose Ekiga among others for its quality, stability and respect of the standards.
All of this would not have been possible without very high quality projects like GTK+, and OPAL (on which I spend as much time as on Ekiga itself).
All of this would not have been possible without the help of developers making the project progress daily by bringing patches and new features.
Ekiga is developed entirely in our spare time, and when I look back in the rear view mirror and see what has been accomplished in 2006, I can only say: Thank you guys, the story continues!
Trophées du libre
I am proud to announce that yesterday Ekiga won one of the Free Software Awards in Soissons. 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.
I would like to thank the organizers for this award, and all the supporters and developers of the project.
I would also like to thank my employer NOVACOM for permitting me to work in the Open Source world.
November Report - 1
Ekiga
The development of Ekiga is going well. My patches for SIP/SIMPLE support are nearly ready to go in CVS, and the WIN32 port is also in very good shape. You can see below a screenshot of Ekiga running on Windows 2000 (sorry, I don’t have better), ready to take calls with an USB headset and supporting SIP Presence through Ekiga.net.
Notice the last category (IPBX NOVACOM), it contains all contacts registered to our IPBX at NOVACOM. Using this list I can simply call anyone, and see if they are already in a call or not. The only thing we need is better icons.
svu: We have another champion here on Ubuntu Edgy, I think I will offer a drink to the 150th user who will report this bug with an unuseful backtrace.
October Report
Trip to Finland
I was invited to present Ekiga at the BIOS event. The event was focused on VoIP and Open Source. I met Olle E. Johansson from Edvina. Olle is a developer of Asterisk, the famous IPBX software. We had an interesting conversation, though too short.
I stayed at Johnny’s house, with his girlfriend Charlotte. Both of them are long-time supporters of the Ekiga project. Thank you again for hosting me at your place, I had a great time!
Trip to Evora, Portugal
I was also invited to present Ekiga during the aLANtejo 2006 event. It seems that I was recommended as a speaker by Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall. The trip was possible thanks to generous sponsorship of the GNOME Foundation. Thanks also!
It was really interesting to be able to present Ekiga in Portugal, because it is a country where there are not many Linux enthousiasts. A part of the audience already knew Linux, but mostly by name, without having already tried it. It was a good thing to present them an alternative to the proprietary Skype, supporting free standards, and running on a Desktop system that does not have anything to envy anymore to the Windows GUI. I also really enjoyed my stay there. Thanks again to Joaquim Rocha for having invited me and for the visit of Evora on Saturday evening. I had a great time with him, Ana, Duarte, Xavier (chronojump), and all the others…
Ekiga
The development is going strong, both on the SIP presence stuff (it is ready), and on the WIN32 port (it is also almost ready). The work will be committed to CVS soon.
On the bad side of things, it seems that Ubuntu Edgy has another bug that generates many duplicates (#359655). It seems to be due to gnome-vfs, but we are not sure yet. However, we receive again many duplicates, most of them without backtrace, each day. It is a pity it is not being fixed given the fact that this specific bug was already known and generating many duplicates during the Beta stage of Edgy.