Francis Robichaud

While there are currently some previews of Netgear’s V2 Skype handset, Nokia labs released a first version of a Gizmo client for all S60 series devices. The software allows SIP communication through Gizmo-Project’s servers. The advantage of SIP over Skype is quite simple: proprietary protocols vs public ! SIP is a communication standard that is now widespread and allows intercommunication between any SIP server. Moreover, some PBXes also support this protocol (see Asterisk).

Many probably wonder what’s the use of a SIP/Skype client on a cellphone. Well, first it gives you the opportunity to have better best international call rates than what your provider offers. The E61/E61i devices have an integrated wifi card that allows you to place calls as if you were on a computer. You can place calls for free to your other online contacts and benefit from the fast connections offered by the wifi technology. The current issue with wifi is it’s limit in distance, you need to constantly be close to the emitter which gives less flexibility than the cellular networks. Eventually, we can expect that the MAN (metropolitan area network) will give an excellent urban coverage and that wifi cellphones will overpass regular cellphone networks. We will then have inexpensive devices/plans because of SIP and the strong competition in this area.

Get Gizmo for your S60 device here

A few posts have been written already on how to get standby to work properly on a Dell inspiron 9400/E1505. I did manage to get this working quite rapidly by fixing three values in the /etc/default/acpi-support file.

vi /etc/default/acpi-support

find and change values of:

SAVE_VBE_STATE=true
POST_VIDEO=false
USE_DPMS=true

you can also try to add “fglrx” in the MODULES_WHITELIST list.

Here is the final result of that file.

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Yesterday I had to find a way to compile libjingle for an eventual use in our university project. So here are a few of the requirements needed to build libjingle and then execute the few examples included in the library. The distro used to compile libjingle is Ubuntu Feisty 7.04.
First you need to install these libraries from the Synaptic Package Manager :

• build-essential
• libspeex-dev
• libspeex1
• libexpat1
• libexpat1-dev
• libssl-dev
• openssl

There are probably a few other libraries missing from the list above, you only need

• Speex 1.1.11.1
• oRTP 0.7.1 (warning only this version is proven to work)
• gcc 4.0.x (I had infinite issues with gcc 3.4.0 and 4.1.0), refer to this post for a post that gives directions on how to install a version of gcc not included in Synpatic. One example is e.g: ./configure –target=i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc –enable-languages=c,c++
• iLBC is included in this file, extract the included ilbc-rfc3951.tar.gz, configure it, make it, install it
• LibJingle 0.4.0

LibJingle can be configure using the parameter –with-ilbc=/usr/local/
You should then be able to make libjingle.
Finally, you can execute the application call in the subfolder talk/examples/call which allows to make a vocal connection with other google talk users.

Good Luck ! If you are running in any problem, make sure you have the listed versions of the files written above.