[Slackbuilds-users] Is Ekiga being phased out of SBo

[Sebastian Arcus]

On 22/02/2022 15:38, Dave Woodfall wrote:
> On 22/02/22 13:27,
> Sebastian Arcus <s.arcus at open-t.co.uk> put forth the proposition:
>> I haven't been able to get Ekiga to work any more since end of March 2021
>> after updating this machine to latest -current (at the time). I eventually
>> managed to get it compiled and installed, but then when trying to connect to
>> any sip account it crashes.
>> When trying to recompile it now I noticed that ponce's SBo git repo now
>> doesn't have Ekiga or Opal any more. Do I take it that Ekiga is now being
>> phased out from SBo? I guess it makes sense as the upstream code hasn't been
>> updated for a few years.
>> I would be ok with switching to another SIP client - but haven't found any
>> so far which actually work properly. Linphone installs fine, but when I try
>> to add a SIP account, it just doesn't do it. No error, nothing.
>> Any suggestions for a SIP client, or how to get Ekiga to work again please?
>> I would prefer a client which supports multiple accounts - but frankly at
>> this stage I would try anything. Thank you.

Hi David,

> 
> Hi Sebastian
> 
> I have been down this road in the past too, and was surprised at the
> lack of a good software phone that had any kind of contacts list, or
> didn't they didn't support basic things like contact groups.
> 
> I found Ekiga to be the most user-friendly phone out there (if you
> can get past some of the cryptic error messages), which is why I
> began maintaining it, but now I use a hardware VOIP phone + local
> asterisk PBX.

I found Ekiga reasonably good as well - until it stopped working. I 
actually use myself VoIP desk phone (mainly Grandstream and old Cisco 
stuff) + Asterisk PBX's at a number of sites. But I need a VoIP 
softphone on my laptop to troubleshoot and reconfigure remotely 
Asterisk servers.

> 
> Unfortunately, the developers stopped working on Ekiga many years
> ago.  The problem now is that one of the dependencies fails to build
> in 15.0, which renders it useless.  Linphone is probably the most,
> maybe only, maintained software phone at the moment, and has been
> getting better over the years.

I've just about managed to get Linphone working now. The trouble was 
that it expects a specific syntax when configuring a sip account 
(username in the format <sip: username at server>, and the proxy address 
needs to start with "sip:" as well) - but there were zero error messages 
in the GUI if you didn't follow that syntax - it just didn't add the 
account - so I was flummoxed for a while.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I plan to have a look at Twinkle 
and see if it will compile and install.