[Ekiga-list] New User Experience

[barf <barf barfone serveftp net>]

Hi All,

New user of Ekiga, some comments which may or not be helpful. First the
positive comment, the video response is far better in linux than
Windoze. It worked fine on the 2 Windoze machines I tried it on

I had a frustrating time trying to get this to work on linux. As you
know when starting out with something new you're never quite sure if its
your hardware, software or the application that's not working. It did
not help that the trouble shooting tips were for version 2 and mostly
irrelevant to version 3.

So I tried first on my main distro Fedora 10 X86-64. Got video but no
audio, sometimes got a could not start device message sometimes not,
after reading this list I removed pulse audio but still no audio (in or
out). Sometimes would not start the camera and needed to log out/in to
get it working again.

Next Fedora 10 I386, same problem as above although I didn't remove
pulse audio.

Next Centos 5.1 i386, yaay, good audio both ways but no video probably
not in the kernel.

Next Open SUSE 11.1 x86-64 on a laptop, nothing worked errors for both
audio and video devices , didn't try to tweak anything.

Next (yes I have few linux machines) Fedora 8 i386. Success, it works,
so now we can have confidence that Ekiga does work and can now try to
get it to play nicely on the other machines

I agree with the comments made else where in this list that a plugin to
handle pulse audio is a must. At the end of the day how many people will
be willing to maintain a machine with an old or degraded distro just to
use Ekiga. Not too many I'd bet and fewer as time goes on.

It would also be extremely helpful if you published a list of distros
that Ekiga works on (without extensive hacking) and those it is known
not to work on, such as any distro using pulse audio.

Summary.
When it did work it was very good but trying to get it to work was
probably more effort than it was worth (about 16 manhours of fiddling
and reading).