Christopher Allan Webber

Christopher Allan Webber at

I talked with Ludo from Guix, he said he wanted to make sure he had some software he knew how to use first packaged in Guix that could do such a call and test it before he proposed "I want to use a free software alternative" when talking about a FLOSS Weekly podcast.

Makes sense. So anyway, he's interested, and so am I, but I guess we'll wait on that to resolve...

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.

Show all 7 replies
I have to agree with Diane on two fronts.

Though it's just an impression, because of it being Java, you could have trouble not only because of dependency hell, but because of bundling, with Jitsi.

And I would much rather suggest something that is a de-juri standards, mostly using XMPP, but also SDP and SRTP based.

But I would like to suggest using Mumble, as a kickstart thing. Though I just noticed it uses C++ and some QT dependencies, I suppose those are not as a challenge as some bundled Java libraries. It seems to use protobuf and speex, but it stlil needs its own server. As a positive thing, you can set it ad-hoc and share the connection details out of band, so you won't have some of the issues of federated networks, like credentials and metadata that bad agents could sniff upon. I know this last comment is controversial, but we can start a new thread about it.

At last, I know some folks who have used Mumble for recording a podcast with multiple people, so at least it's good for the purpose at hand.

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo at 2016-08-17T23:48:55Z

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.

@Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo Mumble is great! The main problem is that it doesn't have video...

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-08-18T13:21:03Z

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.

You could also, in theory, directly use gstreamer to send video over the network. I found one example write up http://www.z25.org/static/_rd_/videostreaming_intro_plab/

It looks like guix has gajim which theoretically can support AV calls, but based on the Debian package it looks like gajim is using gstreamer0.10, so AV probably wouldn't work in guix without some patching.

I glanced at how much of telepathy is in guix, it looks guix still needs farstream, telepathy-farstream, telepathy-mission-control, telepathy-gabble and empathy (or kde-telepathy).

Last I checked telepathy AV calls can work, they're not completely reliable but if you try restarting the call a few times the network gods will usually cooperate and give you a working full-duplex call.

In trying to guess how to package d-bus activatable things the obex package installs its service files in out/share/dbus-1/services and it looks like theres some magic to tell d-bus to search through all of the services installed in a profile.

That leads to another question, can you install services from the command ine? or that only doable through the system configuration file?

Diane Trout at 2016-08-18T17:55:50Z

Christopher Allan Webber, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.

If you are running GuixSD there isn't much you can do about the system configuration without going through the Scheme file. Basically all of /etc is in a /gnu/store package, immutable.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-08-18T20:34:32Z

AJ Jordan, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.