[Klug-general] Ekiga or Skype and Webcams

[Mike Evans]

Alan Pope wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 07:40:23PM +0000, Mike Evans wrote:
>> So now I'm in need of someone else so I can try it out.  I know some 
>> folk have Skype, and I see there is a Beta with video on it, so we could 
>> try that out too/instead.
>>
> 
> Yup, it works pretty well too.
> 
>> Anyone with the time to spare to try and set up a call, or a group to 
>> try a conference, or any advice from anyone who's done it would be great.
>>
> 
> My skype ID is "popeydotcom", feel free to add me and call me if you see I 
> am online. I have a webcam so you can test sending and receiving video 
> (assuming I am sat at my PC at the time) :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Al.
First: thanks to Al for volunteering.  I've installed Skype 2.0 Beta, 
and all went well.  Looks like I'm not going to be able to work with it 
on my current machine though.  It requires Xv.  I'm working with an 
ancient and very specialist nvidia card, for which I can't get a driver 
to work.  I'm therefore on the VESA driver, so no Xv.

On my laptop, which does have accelerated graphics, I don't have 
functioning sound.  I did have on Core 4.  On Core 6 I've never managed 
to get it working and ended up concluding there's a fault in the driver 
or ALSA as some programs even hang when trying to produce sound.  I have 
tried the live Ubuntu from last month's Linux Format - and it works with 
both sound and video so maybe when I have a very long and uncluttered 
weekend I'll undo what Fedora did to my disk partitions with it's 
wretched Logical Volume Management, so that I can have two different 
linux distros on my laptop and install Ubuntu and Fedora Core 8.

I do have plans for a new desktop machine, but with all this time 
wasting I can't get time to spec it out.  Meanwhile Ekiga doesn't 
require any graphics wizardry, and both video and sound seem to work. 
Trouble is: no friends - well none with Ekiga set up.

MikeE