Saturday, February 16, 2008

Google Talk with VOIP on Ubuntu Gutsy

As you all know, its been a while since I've moved from Vista to Ubuntu as my primary OS. Having done that I still miss the ability to do a few things that I used to do with Vista on XP (yes I know I can installed XP as a virtual machine, which I already have, and use that for my Microsoft environment stuff, but I'd still prefer to be able to do them directly with in Ubuntu itself).

One of the things that I missed the most was Google Talk, I was able to setup Pidgin for Google Talk but as we all know, as yet, Pidgin only lets you text chat (which it is very good at), but no VOIP. Most of my friends use Google Talk alongside MSN and that used to be my main medium for voice chat with them till I moved to Ubuntu.

I Googled around a bit and then eventually came across Jabbin. Jabbin is a Jabber (google it up) client that primarily focuses on VOIP, and supports Google Talk Voip.

To install Jabbin you can download the latest version from www.jabbin.com, the one that I downloaded was 'jabbin_2.0beta2-1baltix1_i386' (obviously for Ubuntu). You can download the .deb for this by clicking here .

The problem with installing Jabbin with Ubuntu Gutsy, which you'll notice when you try to install the earlier download .deb, is that Jabbin has a dependency on a Package called 'libssl' version 0.9.7, whereas Ubuntu Gusty come with libssl version 0.9.8. To resolve this just download 'libssl0.9.7_0.9.7k-3_i386' from any of the mirrors here. Once you install libssl0.9.7, install the jabbin .deb that you downloaded earlier and it should install without any problems.

The actual instructions for connecting to the Google Talk network are listed in detail on the Jabbin site and are pretty easy to follow. You can go directly to the page with the instruction for configuring Google Talk on Jabbin by clicking here.

I still havent tried making any calls with Jabbin yet, but regardless I am pretty excited at the possibility of being able to do it. I'll hopefully make a few calls in the coming few days time and then update here with regards to the call quality

Happy GTalk VOIPing on Ubuntu Gutsy!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have tried both Jabbin and PSI - a jabber client and feel that they messed up my contacts list.

I have also used gtalk2voip (http://www.gtalk2voip.com/) and spoken to a friend who is on gtalk. This was much better.

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