foot Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 Skype has a client for linux and it got me thinking about using it to call my friends in US / Canada. Has anyone had any experience with their services? Also, I am tempted to by a bluetooth headphone set for my mobile and wondered if its possible to connect to Skype via a bluetooth dongle? I know the LQ HCL suggests that at least one works, but has anyone got any experience of this kind of set up? Obviously wanna avoid paying out £40 if its never going to work! :) Thanks in advance! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 I use skype all the time. I haven't tried the bluetooth headset though I have been thinking it would be convenient! Its also great combining skype out minutes and skype to skype .conference calls etc. Problem is it takes over my soundcard 100%... I can't play movies or listen to amorok at the same time as having it waiting for a call. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 I use skype every now and then - it's good, worth while using imho.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 Do you know if it'll work on MDK 10.0? I noticed that the download is for MDK 10.1 and wasn't sure whether to install or not? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 Skype works well, one of my friends was in france and someone bought skype credit, so instead of long distance calls, we used skype to his home phone in france. was very cool :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foot Posted March 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 (edited) Bugger it, I'll get a bluetooth headset and dongle from Overclockers and see how it goes at the weekend. Found a few things such as this which suggests its possible and there is some nice stuff about linux and my particular phone here, so it won't be a waste if I can't get the bluetooth skype thing going :) Just thinking how the bluetooth thing would pass me by due to running linux - obviously I was wrong again :D Edited March 21, 2005 by foot Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foot Posted March 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 (edited) OK, the bluetooth dongle works a treat and recognises both the phone and the headset (Logitech HS01) and I can move stuff between phone and computer easily with KbluetoothD. Now KbluetoothD is connected to the headset and gives me a connection address (00:0D:44 etc etc) and recognises the device etc etc. This has to be good. Now, I don't suppose any of you clever people could translate this Skype thread, which refers to this article, which refers to this. Its all so waaay beyond me at the moment and without some guidance I'll probably do more harm than good! Skype is telling me that I should be making headset calls through /dev/dsp' which does exist, but the route inbetween has phrases like 'compiling kernels' and applying patches. It won't be the end of the world if I can get the bluetooth headset to work Skype and its certainly not a 'reboot' windows kinda situation, but it would be quite cool! The set up is a pretty much standard mandrake 10.1 jobbie using KDE. Edited March 21, 2005 by foot Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 It says you need to get a sound driver for it. I cant help but wonder if Mandrake includes it, paste us the output of lsmod modprobe snd-bt-sco ls /dev/dsp* iphitus [/code] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted March 21, 2005 Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 skype is a great service, but there's a lot of SIP systems out there that do the same thing in a much more open fashion, they just don't have the hype. I really hope the next release of GnomeMeeting helps to kick SIP's popularity up there at least within the open source world. Having said that, I use Skype and Skypeout to call my family in the UK; they've really done a nice job of engineering a good system with a good interface, it's just a shame it's all proprietary. bluetooth audio stuff really has not had any work on friendly configuration in MDK yet, sorry. Hope you can get it going, we'll give all the help we can :). I hope this can be done for the next version of MDK... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foot Posted March 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 Thanks iphitus and Adam - like I said, its nothing terribly important - obviously I can just stick a microphone in. The other thing is trying to show other people that much more is poss with GNU/Linux than they probably think. Its easy to say 'virues? spyware?' when the windows people get their usual problems, but its another thing to actually be positive, beyond showing a few screenies. Bah, the output: Module Size Used by isofs 31352 1 nvidia 3913948 12 md5 3584 1 ipv6 230916 10 rfcomm 32348 8 snd-seq-midi 6624 0 snd-emu10k1-synth 6656 0 snd-emux-synth 34976 1 snd-emu10k1-synth snd-seq-virmidi 5632 1 snd-emux-synth snd-seq-midi-emul 7200 1 snd-emux-synth snd-seq-oss 31232 0 snd-seq-midi-event 6080 3 snd-seq-midi,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-seq-oss snd-seq 47440 8 snd-seq-midi,snd-emux-synth,snd-seq-virmidi,snd- seq-midi-emul,snd-seq-oss,snd-seq-midi-event snd-pcm-oss 49480 0 snd-mixer-oss 17376 2 snd-pcm-oss snd-emu10k1 90728 3 snd-emu10k1-synth snd-rawmidi 19300 3 snd-seq-midi,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm 81800 2 snd-pcm-oss,snd-emu10k1 snd-timer 20356 2 snd-seq,snd-pcm snd-seq-device 6344 7 snd-seq-midi,snd-emu10k1-synth,snd-emux-synth,sn d-seq-oss,snd-seq,snd-emu10k1,snd-rawmidi snd-ac97-codec 69392 1 snd-emu10k1 snd-page-alloc 7400 2 snd-emu10k1,snd-pcm snd-util-mem 3232 2 snd-emux-synth,snd-emu10k1 snd-hwdep 6916 2 snd-emux-synth,snd-emu10k1 snd 45988 15 snd-emux-synth,snd-seq-virmidi,snd-seq-oss,snd- seq,snd-pcm-oss,snd-mixer-oss,snd-emu10k1,snd-rawmidi,snd-pcm,snd-timer,snd-seq- device,snd-ac97-codec,snd-hwdep soundcore 7008 2 snd ipt_limit 1760 8 iptable_mangle 2080 0 ipt_LOG 5568 8 ipt_MASQUERADE 2720 0 iptable_nat 21164 1 ipt_MASQUERADE ipt_TOS 1856 0 ipt_REJECT 5536 1 ip_conntrack_irc 70256 0 ip_conntrack_ftp 71120 0 ipt_state 1408 6 ip_conntrack 28616 5 ipt_MASQUERADE,iptable_nat,ip_conntrack_irc,ip_c onntrack_ftp,ipt_state iptable_filter 2080 1 ip_tables 14624 9 ipt_limit,iptable_mangle,ipt_LOG,ipt_MASQUERADE, iptable_nat,ipt_TOS,ipt_REJECT,ipt_state,iptable_filter af_packet 16072 2 floppy 55088 0 tulip 43040 0 ide-cd 37280 1 cdrom 37724 1 ide-cd hidp 11296 2 l2cap 19876 12 rfcomm,hidp hci_usb 10912 7 bluetooth 39076 16 rfcomm,hidp,l2cap,hci_usb loop 12520 0 supermount 34804 1 via-agp 7360 1 agpgart 27752 2 nvidia,via-agp ehci-hcd 26244 0 uhci-hcd 28752 0 usbcore 103172 5 hci_usb,ehci-hcd,uhci-hcd ext3 120680 2 jbd 49080 1 ext3 [root@spc1-stok2-5-0-cust225 matt]# modprobe snd-bt-sco FATAL: Module snd-bt-sco not found. [root@spc1-stok2-5-0-cust225 matt]# ls /dev/dsp* /dev/dsp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michel Posted April 2, 2005 Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 (edited) It seems that the good sound-quality of skype is because it uses a 16 khz encoding instead of the 8 khz and mayeb other things. You can have this encoding also with speex( speex.org). I only know one applicartion that supports 16 khz speex and that is linphone. Gnomemeeting will have support for it in gnomemeeting 2.0 I believe. One friend of me asked to use skype, but I don't want to sue it if there are open alternatives that are of the same of better quality (I want to check it out anyway to compare them and make a decision then). The problem is finding an application that can also be used on windows. Mayeb phonegaim is a solution since there is a beta-version for windows. I have to say that the skyp-out rates are quite cheap indeed. I compared them for Belgium to the sipphone-rates (anyway, the company that is related to linspire) and the sipphone-rates are twice those of skype-out. Michel P.S.: you could also check voip-info.org if you're interested in headsets(sip, skype, ...): http://voip-info.org/wiki-VOIP+Phones Edited April 2, 2005 by Michel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kompact Posted April 27, 2005 Report Share Posted April 27, 2005 I have not tried Skype on Linux yet, but have used it on XP for the last year to talk to my bro overseas. We get better quality on it then the phone. I assume the same would hold true for Linux. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted April 27, 2005 Report Share Posted April 27, 2005 I've used skype on XP and Linux and the quality is excellent on both... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sellis Posted April 27, 2005 Report Share Posted April 27, 2005 (edited) On the urging of a friend who was travelling to Korea, I installed Skype on WinXP last week and finally go around to putting it on Mandrake 10.0 this morning. I installed from the .tar.bz version, since I wasn't sure about the 10.1 RPM, and I needed to get another dependency (libdbus - no idea what it does, but it was available from the source-contrib RPM repository thingy). Made a link on the desktop, and it just works. Flippin' marvellous, and even with my utterly-cheap-99p-from-ebuyer microphone/earbud combo, the quality isn't bad at all. Certainly better than my actual phone. Highly recommended. Edit: 100 posts. Apparently I win another penguin. Edited April 27, 2005 by sellis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.