Gtalk Voice Chat in Linux: No more a dream

There were some things that I always missed in linux. One of them was Voice chat through gtalk. I had always dreamt of the day when I would be able to do that. That dream has come true now through empathy.

Empathy is a Instant Messenger client. It uses Telepathy and Nokia’s Mission Control, and reuses Gossip’s UI. The main goal is to permit desktop integration by providing libempathy and libempathy-gtk libraries. libempathy-gtk is a set of powerful widgets that can be embeded into any GNOME application.

Its pretty easy to install and even easier to make it work. In skype, I had spent some hours to make my voice chat working but empathy has made everything so simple that start from installation to get it work, it took me not more than 5 mins. (Your net speed does matter though :P). Enough beating around the bush...... Here are the instructions to set it up on your machine...

Fedora:
su -
yum install empathy

Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get empathy

This will complete the installation.

There are some dependencies like:
1. telepathy-gabble
2. telepathy-mission-control
3. telepathy-stream-engine
4. telepathy-butterfly python-msn

Make sure these are installed as well.

Using Empathy

You can start Empathy from Applications –> Internet –> Empathy Instant Messenger

Configure your gmail account with the following settings

1. In Empathy, Edit –> Accounts gtalk0 is checked

2. For Gtalk account you have to give Login ID user-name@gmail.com

3. Server is: talk.google.com

4. Port is 5223, and

5. Use old ssl is checked

That's all. Now go waste as much of your internet bandwidth as possible. ;)

P.S.: There is no support for proxy right now in empathy. So, users behind proxy have to wait for some more time or have to use their brain(I hope you got it what I mean).

Feel free to post your problems over here.

Mac Vs Linux

Until this post I use to feel whatever Macintosh does is a benchmark for all GUI lovers. But then I came across this website comparing Mac with Linux, and revealing things that Linux does better than Mac. I personally haven't used Mac much and I am pure linux freak, but still had a tremendous respect for Macintosh even I don't appreciate there policy of closed source. Because what they claim(UI), they do it best. Well, this GOD like respect came down a bit after reading this which every linux freak should read. It acted as an eye opener to me. Probabaly will do the same for many of you too.

http://www.internetling.com/2008/08/12/5-things-linux-does-better-than-mac-os-x/

Many more posts to come in near future on linux. So linux freaks keep checking....

Copyleft

P.S. : Those who don't know Copyleft, must know and google it around to find it out. Don't expect me to spoon feed you. :P

What is more fascinating??

Breaking codes, analyzing protocols...... feels like soon you gonna become one of those code breaking geeks. Li Gong, Ricardo Corin et al inspires you to work in this area of Alice and Bob. Applying newly learned algorithm on the never understood(atleast I hardly understood the biological complexities) biological problems, and getting amazed by helping biologists with your simple applications on their problems. These was the phase when I was cofused which field is more interesting to work on. One field where, now even Shamir would have found it difficult to make a giant leap. And the other where biologists are astonished by the progress made by a newbie. One where you can visualize the things working and other where you find it difficult the terms to sink in. Both were dragging me into there own pool of research and then came the third area that drove me crazzzzzzzzzzy. It was modern graphics architecture.

Now I feel how do one decide, which area to work on when you have so many options and so many interests to work on? When do one say Gosh!!! This is the field I had always wanted to work on. I still can't say which is more fascinating out of all 3 - graphic architecture, cryptography or bioinformatics. Only one thing I know for sure that for the rest 1.5 years I am gonna work on modern graphics architecture and I know I am gonna fall in love with it. And I wish there would be a day when I will say .... Yes! this was the field I always wanted to work on.