Re: [orca-list] VOIP programs that work well with Orca

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

Mangler is supposed to work very well with Orca, and for me it did until 
I tried to chat with it and it died. Perhaps a bad version. I may try it 
again. Mangler is a Ventrilo client, however, and therefore is subject 
to breakage if the proprietary protocol changes.

Perhaps the best voice over IP client I have found so far is SFLPhone. 
It can run minimized in the notification panel and it's very easy to 
use. Works great with Orca from my personal experience. SFLPhone, unlike 
Mangler or the dreaded Skype, is a SIP client, so it is truly free and 
standards compliant. No need to go round and round in circles with dirty 
hacks or wait for a developer to reverse engineer a protocol again if 
something breaks. No need to have two programs running at once just so 
you can use one to talk to the other. It works out of the box, and all 
you need is a SIP account, which is free of cost and easy to find. And 
just like email, you will be able to talk to anyone else who has a SIP 
account, no matter what server they use.

Also, if SFLPhone doesn't work for you, I found Linphone to be quite 
usable as well. Linphone is also a SIP client, and the only problem I 
found with it is that I couldn't start it minimized. Otherwise, I 
actually found it somewhat easier to use than SFLPhone.

Lastly, I wouldn't hold my breath for Skype. It uses proprietary and 
potentially insecure protocols that, according to Skype's terms of 
service, can route your conversation through other people's computers or 
route other people's conversations through your computer. Skype is also 
seriously behind in development of the Linux software version, perhaps 
even to the point of not caring whether they support it or not. At this 
point, you have to keep the Skype software running in order to even use 
it to talk through pidgin or any of the other hacks that can be used to 
communicate with its rather lacking API, so you might as well use a 
separate program or even use SIP directly through Empathy or Pidgin. 
Note that I would love to be corrected on any of these points, 
considering it was at the beginning of this year that I did my research 
that came to this conclusion, and some of these things could have 
changed by now. I truly hope they have. Still, my overall recommendation 
would be to use SIP or another free and open protocol, help to improve 
it by letting developers know of any problems you find either with the 
protocol itself, with the application you're using or with its 
compatibility with Orca, and try to convince as many people as you can 
to do the same. After all, open and free protocols, like open and free 
applications, can continue to be usable if something goes wrong with one 
server or one version of a program. On the other hand, Skype could shut 
down tomorrow and no one would ever be able to use it, because it would 
be impossible to get another server up and running or to figure out the 
protocol enough to reroute it.

Just my $0.02, hope it was useful to feed the fish if nothing else. LOL.
~Kyle