Videoconferencing for Linux

PHONE FORMATS: SIP VS. H.323

The two most common protocols found in the VoIP world are sip and H.323. Basically, H.323 is a telco-oriented protocol maintained by the ITU, and sip is an Internet-oriented protocol maintained by IETF. Most Internet VoIP implements sip. H.323 seems to me to be a standard with declining support in the Internet community. While support of both is preferable, if one has to choose one or the other as an end user, I'd go with sip.

You can find a much more technologically oriented and detailed comparisons here and here.

Linux for Skype: This is a proprietary format with no video support, unlike the Mac/Win products. While it appears to work, it is still not recommended. There's no longer any reason to recommend a product for Linux that doesn't have a feature set as good as that of Win/OSX versions.

Ekiga (formerly gnomemeeting): Ekiga installation and setup works, is relatively easy, fairly well supported, and can easily be connected to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). That is, you can videoconference computer-to-computer and make phone calls with it, too. It supports both sip and h.323. The instructions provided here will be for sip setup; if you need H.323, you can get setup information from the documentation. It may already be installed. If not, you can probably install it through your distribution's automated installer.

Supported Distros: Fedora Core/RHEL, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, source.

Install Ekiga:

First, see if it's already installed with your distro by checking the menus.

In KDE, find it in Start > Internet > Ekiga

Debian / Ubuntu:

# aptitude install ekiga

To install with other distros, use the automatic installer for your distro to try installing it You might as well wait to run the configuration utility until after you've set up the firewall and done any router setup necessary. If not, go to the Ekiga download page and if possible, download and manually install the ekiga binary for your distro via distro installation tool. For example, if rpm,

# rpm -i ekiga*

. If there isn't one, build from source. First, download all the source tarballs on the page. Then follow the build-from-source instructions in the Camorama / Camstream section above for each tarball.

Other Libraries Required:

Chose a distro and download here.

In Debian, you can get a list of installable plug-ins by:

# aptitude search libpt
i A libpt-plugins-alsa - Portable Windows Library Audio Plugin for the ALSA Interface
i libpt-plugins-oss - Portable Windows Library Audio Plugins for the OSS interface 
i libpt-plugins-v4l - Portable Windows Library Video Plugin for Video4Linux
i libpt-plugins-v4l2 - Portable Windows Library Video Plugin for Video4Linux2
i A libpth20 - The GNU Portable Threads

In the display, i = installed, A=automatically installed (usually to satisfy a dependency.) Bold face indicates the ones I actually installed.

Use the equivalent search feature in your distro's automatic installer. Or download and install the plug-ins manually that you need from the above URL. Your distribution will probably install it automatically. (The ones in bold were the ones I had to install.)

If you need more information, the Ekiga FAQ entry is here.