Re: [LAU] Installing Google Voice Chat for Linux on Fedora instead of Debian

From: Niels Mayer <nielsmayer@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Fri Aug 27 2010 - 18:34:33 EEST

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 1:58 AM, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
> Don't blame Google for that. On all five of the computers around here, ALSA sets up the PC speaker as an input source!

Skype beta for Linux (2.1.0.47), for example, uses, or works well
alongside the phonon framework. That way, when i setup
SystemSettings->ComputerAdministration->Multimedia->{AudioOutput,AudioCapture}->Communication->LogitechUSBHeadset
, skype ends up using the headset. And if some other app, like
google-chrome&voice are hogging the headset even when not actively
using them, skype will automatically go on and use the next configured
device. If that "device" happens to be Jackd, then phonon will do the
right thing and actually invoke jackd with all the right arguments. (I
was surprised by the level of "magical" Jack integration  in phonon).

No such luck with either google-chrome or this new google-voice thing.
I might end up giving konqueror a go since at least it will use phonon
to connect the browser to the audio devices.

> But all five of the computers here run Debian and have for many years. Outside a few folk on LAU, I don't know anyone who runs Fedora. So, clearly, you are a fringe-case. ;-)

Seems like Fedora is preferred by those that are professional computer
scientists or engineers, whereas Ubuntu is targeted at consumers.
Likewise, since Fedora eventually becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
there's a good chance your financial institutions, telecom companies,
online web services, etc are actually using product versions of
"Fedora 10" or "Fedora 11."  How exactly is that "fringe" ?

As to why there might be Fedora users on LAU, consider the existence
of a major repository of Pro Audio/Video software (and realtime
patches of current fedora kernels)
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/%c2%a0as well as the fact
that ALSA creator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Kysela%c2%a0works
there as well as Pulseaudio creator
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering%c2 .

Also, ignoring the entire RPM community doesn't just ignore Fedora, it
also ignores http://www.opensuse.org/ a major distro with backing from
Novell and AMD. (Which might be the real reason for making RPM second
fiddle at Google -- the fact that Suse Linux Enterprise and Desktop
provides competition to Google's main business: stealing all of
Microsoft's Office and .Net customers:
http://techrights.org/2009/03/24/sled-11-is-about-mono-tech/ ).

The most popular answer on google's help for google-voice:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/chat/thread?tid=10ffe01c3a4779f5
...........
8/19/10 Popular answer
Great! Any word on how soon we can expect an RPM package? :-)
..........
supporting linux means releasing a source not a .deb or .rpm package!
try to respect us, release a clean tar.gz file! we can build our own
package! you may have to know that linux distros are not only debian
and redhat.
..........
hunternet93 8/20/10
We need a source package, or at least a binary not locked to any
specific package manager. I'm on Sabayon, and I've been waiting to use
Google video chat for a long time.
..........
jspaleta 8/20/10
Please provide a tar.gz for widest available usage for those of use
not using debian based systems. Ironic..considering that Google is
using portage internally for ChromeOS development. You would think
that a Gentoo friendly tarball would be a priority.
If you decide to make an rpm version as well as providing a tarball...
I'm willing to help even under NDA terms if that is required.  But
having a tar.gz of the binary is more important.
..........
ulif Level 1 8/26/10
Skype provide a RPM package which works without problems on opensuse -
why should I jump through hoops to install Gmail phone/video? Plenty
of other things to do. When Google bring out the RPM (preferably one
for x86_64 CPU) then I am interested.
............

As usual bad ALSA integration and bad mixer interfaces are a problem
with google's
implementation, but not with skype:

............
I had to go into alsamixer and hit F4 to change to the capture
devices. Then I had to turn up the Digital microphone device because
it was turned all the way down. Kind of weird as I never had to crank
that up on Skype or Gizmo or any other VoIP program, but at least it
works and now I'm happy! :D
...........

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
Received on Sat Aug 28 12:15:06 2010

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Aug 28 2010 - 12:15:06 EEST