MSN , GTalk , Yahoo voice chat on linux
Apr 6th, 2008 by admin
Most newbies are asking me how to do things they used to do on Windows….
There are alternatives for almost everything…but when it comes to voice/video chat on Yahoo/MSN/GTalk , then it is a dead end !
It is true that Gyach Enhanced used to support voice/video for yahoo since more than 2 years….but it is not maintained anymore, and wasn’t working all the time.
Now I found a really good alternative for calling almost everything !
it is called gtalk2vip.com , read the faq here : http://gtalk2voip.com/faq.shtml
To start , you need a SIP client , any SIP client should work (ekiga,gizmo,linphone……) personally I use twinkle on linux and I already have a voip account.
If you don’t have a voip account configured , you can get free one from gtalk2voip…..or if you use Ekiga, it will create one for you during the first time wizard.
Once you have the voip account configure in your client , you can start calling other IMs :
# GTalk: user@domain.com can be reached by calling to sip:user_at_domain.com@gtalk.gtalk2voip.com
# MSN: user@domain.com can be reached by calling to sip:user_at_domain.com@msn.gtalk2voip.com
# Yahoo: user@yahoo.com can be reached by calling to sip:user_at_yahoo.com@yahoo.gtalk2voip.com
I tested it on GTalk ,MSN and the voice was very clear and quick….but it didn’t work with Yahoo Messenger for some reason.
Regarding Gizmo , last month I mentioned that the new version supports calls to yahoo/msn/gtalk. Later , I found that it uses the same gtalk2voip service. So it is not like they have done anything……(except importing your contacts).