Since my supervisor suggested we try out Skype, I picked up a headset and signed
up. I was somewhat surprised that Skype has a Linux client, and
doublely surprised that it comes in a Debian package that even goes so
far as to create a menu item in the Gnome menus. This is pretty
amazing for a commercial software package. It seems to work pretty
well. Except for when I was talking to my supervisor I was getting a
really bad echo. I thought it was my set up at first, but the more I
think about it, the more it seems that her microphone was picking up
the output of her speakers and feeding it back to me. Hearing myself
with a 1/2 second delay was very distracting.
I have two sound cards in my computer, the crappy on-board nVidia
one and a SoundBlaster PCI 128. The SoundBlaster has surround sound,
but I don't have the external hardware to take advantage of that. For
the longest time I've been wondering how to get the other line-out
(the rear speaker channels) to drive my speakers, so that I could
leave the headphones plugged into the headphone jack, and stop having
to crawl under my desk to switch between them all the time. I finally
figured it out yesterday, using the ALSA drivers.
The aplay -l command lists the devices ALSA knows
about. The SoundBlaster shows two DACs:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 0: ES1371/1 [ES1371 DAC2/ADC]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 1: ES1371/2 [ES1371 DAC1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Card 0 device 0 is the headphone jack, and card 0 device 1 is the
line out/rear channel jack. Since I generally use mplayer to watch movies and stuff
using the external speakers, the mplayer command mplayer -ao
alsa:mmap:device=hw#0.1 WRC_2004.WMV sends the sound
to the speakers instead of to the headphones. I have a user called
freevo (but I don't actually use freevo at the moment) which
runs its own X server so that the TV out works. I created a .asoundrc
file to tell ALSA to use the line out/rear speaker channels by default
for that user:
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
# Headphones
#device 0
# Speakers
device 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}
I hooked the crappy headset up to the crappy on-board sound card,
so now I have three devices hooked up full time, and no more
under-desk adventures!
I saw a couple of blog entries on Planet Debian regarding Skype and
other VOIP applications: Google Talk And Skype
Are Boring, And Here's Why, and Internet
telephony: skip Skype, use SIP, and related posts. The amount of
open stuff that is out there for internet telephony is pretty amazing,
which is nice. I still haven't learned enough to be any kind of
knowledgeable about it, but voip-info.org should be able to help
with that.
I tried using linphone, but the interface is pretty primitive, but
it should work for direct peer-to-peer SIP calls. I also tried Free World Dialup (FWD), which
seems to act a SIP proxy to make it easier to connect to other users
on the same service, no matter where you are or what your IP address
happens to be at the time. I couldn't figure out how to get linphone
to work with it, and couldn't install kphone for some reason, but the
commercial softphone Xten
X-Lite worked ok.... as long as you follow the instructions on
FWD's page. The interface attempts to look like a real phone, which
just makes it all confusing to use. It does work thought, at least I
was able to call the echo service and some other utility numbers FWD
has set up.
The good thing about Skype is that it is extremely easy to get
started with. You don't have to sign up on a web page. You don't have
to think about other services. Everything is included in a single
package, wrapped up in a fairly good, easy-to-use interface. Its
simple. Using SIP seems to be much more complicated.
The other VOIP thing I came across recently is an
article about setting up a PBX using Asterisk. Its crazy what you can
do with it. Here is another blog entry about setting
up asterisk. Now I want to set up a PBX... but not before doing a
freevo/MythTV PVR (which we are bound to
use a lot more).
It's kind of ironic that I find myself interested in VOIP, since I
don't really like using the telephone we have right now, and since I'm
just plain awkward on the phone. Oh well, toys are toys and they are
fun to play with, even if one doesn't get a lot of real world use out
of them.
