Author: David Ashley dash@xdr.com http://www.xdr.com/dash Program name: Phone Program Homepage: http://www.linuxmotors.com/phone
- Description
- Phone is a two way, full duplex internet phone application for linux. You must have a full duplex sound card, the kernel driver must support the board's full duplex capability, and finally the kernal driver must actually work as promised. If any of those 3 are broken, most likely the program won't work right.
- Copying
- See the file COPYING for copy information.
Why use this program when there are so many internet phones available? 1) Not for linux. And the linux programs I've seen are push to talk, ie
not full duplex, and don't work very well. 2) Some other programs don't include source. 3) Most other programs don't deal with the connection issue. So you'd have
to have ICQ to chat and make the connection. Overall reduces the
spontaneity.
4) Commercial, under win32. For example dialpad requires you to view their
advertisements on your screen, and their window keeps popping forward. Or they're commercial in that you need to have their soundboard to use them, and you can only talk to someone else with the same soundcard, or another made by the same company. Or you get horrible dropouts or just plain awful quality all the time.
How can I afford to run the matching service? I'm hoping the use of this program will become common enough so I can charge a small yearly fee for unlimited access to the server. As it is I'm using the server for other pursuits and there is leftover bandwidth.
Some info on sound boards:
Known to work with very good quality:
Crystal CS4235, CS4232 chipsets.
Soundblaster Ensonique Audio PCI
Known to work but in reduced quality in full duplex mode: Soundblaster AWE64
Probably don't work due to driver problems: Soundblaster VIBRA16 (Driver claims full duplex, but audio out doesn't work). Yamaha opl3sa2 seems to have awful full duplex noise. ALS120 (As I recall, sound input IRQ problems (timeouts))
Setting up an account:
Visit Phone's homepage and enter your email address there. Your email
address will not be given out, and you'll not receive spam from me. The
email address is required so you can receive the pass information, which
is needed for security.
If you lose your password, just enter it again on the web page and it will be mailed to you. Keep in mind, however, that the server will only mail off the password once in any 24 hour period.
There is some name checking going on in the email application form process.
At the moment you can only have
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789._-
Also you must have exactly one @ in the name, and you must have some
non-zero number of legal characters to either side of it.
Compiling Phone:
Pretty much just cd to the directory and do
make
The current version doesn't require any special libraries. The program
generated is named "phone".
Phone looks for $HOME/.phonerc for commands, so you need to set that file up.
Set up your $HOME/.phonerc file as follows:
user <your email address that you want to be known by> pass <pass # as assigned by server, keep this secret> alias <from> <email address of person you want to talk to>
You can have any number of alias directives. If two or more contain the same <from> value, the latest one in the file is used.
Commands from within phone:
<address> below refers to an email address or an alias to one.
list
Print out your contact list.
add <address>
Add a person to your contact list. Max of 32. Excess names are quietly ignored. del <address>
Remove a person from your contact list. who
List your buddies who are online. For you to know they are online, you
must be in their friend list.
call <address>
Place a call.
answer
Answer an incoming call.
info
Prints out some statistics during a connection. bye
End the current phone connection.
alias
List aliases.
quit
Exit the program.
Sample .phonerc file:
--- cut here --- cut here --- cut here --- cut here ---
user someone@anywhere.yentl.nz
pass ab44316827f
alias doug someone.else@somewhere.org
--- cut here --- cut here --- cut here --- cut here ---