Mostly Harmless

One of the things that I sometimes miss on Linux is the ability of voice chat. Skype is the only IM network that supports voice call to and from Linux machines. However, with recent release of libjingle by Google, it is now possible to call my friends using Google Talk from Linux. psi-jingle branch of psi has implemented the support of libjingle. I recently installed it on my desktop running SuSE 9.3 and it works great. Here is the procedure for installation.

1. Get the sources either directly from the darcs repository

darcs get --partial --set-scripts-executable http://dev.psi-im.org/darcs/psi-jingle

or download this tarball.

2. Install all required packages (use apt)

apt install speex-devel
apt install qca-devel

3. Compile ORTP from source because the version of package in repository was not compatible.

wget http://www.linphone.org/ortp/sources/ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz; cd ortp-0.7.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make && make install

4. Install psi-jingle

cd psi-jingle
./configure --enable-jingle --with-qca-inc=/usr/lib/qt3/include/ --with-qca-lib=/usr/lib/qt3/lib/   
           --with-ortp-lib=/usr/lib/ --with-ortp-inc=/usr/include/  
           --with-glib-inc=/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0/ --with-glib-lib=/opt/gnome/lib/ 
           --with-glibconfig-inc=/opt/gnome/lib/glib-2.0/include/
make

5. Fire up psi and login to Google Talk network and start voice chatting.

It is important to note that psi-jingle is an under development code and there may be bugs (although it works fine for me). If there are problems, check artsd is not running and mic is functioning fine.

Note: these instructions will work only with 32-bit OS. While I was able to successfully compile it on amd64, the procedure was non-trivial and required me to edit many Makefiles and source files manually.