Linux Soft Phone Roundup
Ekiga
Ekiga - Startup Window
Ekiga is probably one of the older and more stable soft phone available on Linux. It meets most of my criteria pretty well. Where it falls somewhat short is the user interface.
The Call Panel (where the Ekiga log and "Standby" text is) area is where you would see video during a call, or the current status of an active call, number, volume controls, the selected codec.
It does support multiple accounts, and it is quite stable.
Ekiga is actually quite good in most aspects. Its missing a few of my key feature requirements though. Most notably, it doesn't deal well with NAT. There is no where in the configuration to setup a STUN server or enable or disable any of the more advanced NAT handling features. Because of this, I wasn't able to receive any calls with Ekiga, only make them. I could have jumped through hoops and done port forwarding in my router, etc., but thats not an acceptable requirement for a SIP client to have.
It also doesn't let me define any hot keys for anything. I have to use my mouse to do everything. Its default window is a bit bigger than it needs to be, but that can be adjusted easily by disabling the Call Panel.
Its also rather annoying that even though you can see the buttons, merely having the window focused is not enough to let you dial with the numeric keypad or number keys. You have to actually be focused in the text box or click on the buttons with your mouse to dial a number.
As I noted, Ekiga has support for Video as well, but it seems mostly only useful for connecting with others running Ekiga since it supports only H.261 and Theora video codecs. Most conference calling works with H.263 or H.264.
Ekiga Conclusions
So, with Ekiga I got most of what I wanted, with the biggest exception being that I couldn't actually use it to receive inbound calls. So much for Ekiga, moving on to the next one.
Categories
- No categories