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.