ekiga in portage!

Ekiga in action on my KDE desktop Ekiga is a shiny new VoIP-application. The successor of old gnomemeeting featuring SIP-Support and much more. The name has been changed for a reason: to show that it is not only for gnome. And as you can see on the screenshot I am using kde with ekiga and it works perfectly.

It is one of the best open source VoIP applications out there, although in my opinion skype has still the better audio quality. But if you want to use open standards like SIP or H323 then ekiga is for you. You can also try another voip client application for linux, some are not in portage yet:
closed source:
skype, gizmo, x-lite
open source:
ekiga, wengophone, linphone, kphone, psi-jingle

As ekiga is included in gnome-2.14 it was originally masked but I unmasked it today because it does not depend on any other gnome-2.14 components. Please test it and help me to make the ebuild as good as possible.

Experimental drivers on the livecd

Recently the mobile herd got a request for a driver to be included on the livecd that has not been marked stable yet because it is new. Current policy says that a driver has to be stable to be included on the livecd. Current policy also says that a driver has to be in the tree for 30 days to be marked stable.

Now the problem is, that many new drivers do not get included on the livecd and many people have to use non-gentoo-livecds to intall their gentoo operating systems. This situation will not change for 2005.0 if the snapshot is to be taken in <1 month. Waiting for 2006.0 as the next stable livecd is a really long time.
However, as the releng team is really loaded with work, it does not seem possible to regularly get experimental livecds with new drivers or new driver-versions on them. A smart way to solve this is to put the drivers as binaries on an usb-key, precompiled for the livecd environment. I will consider putting some drivers precompiled for the 2005.1 livecd on my devspace when there is increasing demand for it after it has been released. Oh, and thanks to John for the idea 🙂

Will the Love-Sources tradition die?

For a long time now we were able to watch the flamewars between Lovechild and ciaranm. Recently there has been a change, Lovechild got banned in the Gentoo forums by klieber in December 2004 for that post.

Now ian has moved the non-official kernel patchset-threads to “Off the Wall”, this move may be provoked by ciaranms permanent “convincing”. Ian said to me that he is “at this time [I’m] supporting developers who were calling for help”.
Most of the “non-official” users understand why this step was made, but they are not happy with it as “Off the Wall” is usually used for non-gentoo topics.
There is currently a proposal by the users to open up a new forum for gentoo-related but not official projects.
I hope we can get the current situation improved by this move.

About Myself — Acrobat Reader 7.0

Hi,

I am a gentoo developer working on kernel/hardware/mobile/net-dialup ebuilds but also on completely unrelated parts like acroread or lineak. I joined gentoo because I wanted to get my ebuilds from bugzilla in the tree, so I usually try to help others having ebuilds lying around for months in bugzilla.

Currently I am testing the ebuild for the new Acrobat Reader 7.0 to get it to perfection. I got an interesting mail about how I could get the browser plugin to work on both firefox and mozilla, I am still testing. Quite interestingly, the “7.0” we use now is not the final product but an early pre-release to meet tax-deadlines in the Netherlands.