recommendation for voip in gentoo?

[jyoung]

I've been using skype for a while, but I've been meaning to migrate away from it since it was purchased by microsoft. Any recommendations? The main goal is to be able to make phone calls from my desktop for laptop. I'm not picky about the phone number, and it doesn't necessarily have to be free.[/url]

[szatox]

Unfotrunately softphones on desktop appear to be pretty much dead.
You can still use asterisk to create your own phone branch, and optionally trunk it to the public phone exchange (and even wrap it with freepbx for easier configuration), but softphone clients for linux are a mess. I tired a bunch, some wouldn't even build, others wouldn't run, and the one I managed to start wouldn't talk to my modem. I haven't tried making asterisk talk to my modem, I figured it's pointless without a client that would talk to asterisk.
Looks like all the remaining effort is focused on android.

Well, there is 3cx too, which comes with a web client, if you don't mind calling from your browser using javascript. Like freepbx, it uses asterisk on the backend, and AFAIR its web client allows video calls and desktop sharing as well.
Doesn't change it being javascript in a web browser. Fine for calling someone, bad for making yourself available to calls. Still, some people find it acceptable, so I guess it's worth pointing out.
Hardware sip phones still exist too, which you can connect to asterisk in the office (this includes freepbx and 3cx), but I wouldn't want to carry one when traveling and so on, so definitely not laptop-friendly, and hadware phones are definitely not gentoo.

[C5ace]

I use voipbuster.com for more than 20 years. You can call via web browser, router with voip, such as Huawai, FritzBox and many others, and from mobile phone. Calls to landlines in many countries are free for several month after payment is made. Rates are about 1/3 of Skype. Rates to Thailand Mobile are USD 0.028, to North Korea are USD 0.393, to USA are FREE.
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[jyoung]

Thanks! Those are some options to look at. Too bad the genre is generally dying out.

[gorg86]

Linphone was in the portage tree back in the day https://www.linphone.org

[jyoung]

Yeah, I saw linphone when I was looking around. It looks like a recent removal, since some of the gentoo documentation still lists it. Have you used it?

[gorg86]

Yes I used it, it was the only open source one that worked on my machine and was/is in active development. The problem was my SIP provider back then used some weird parameters and Linphone (like most programs) lacked severely in terms of configuration options. That was a long time ago, maybe things changed. I also tried Ekiga, unfortunately NOTHING worked with that one.

[szatox]

I found linphone in nest overlay, but it requires pulseaudio. Well, you can try it if you don't mind. I'd rather not touch my sound.
Ekiga is on the list of "10 voip applications to use in 2023" or something like that. Yes, with 2023 in the headline. And... that's about it. LOL
tried it like 15 years ago, without much success.

Funny enough, the voip thing that was the closes to working for me back in the days when it was a relatively new thing was Psi (psi-pedrito and later I think psi+) with jingle enabled. So, using jabber for setting up direct connections (which didn't always work, because ISPs use NAT "for your protection" and totally not because they are cheap with IP addresses).

However, this reminds me of Pidgin from gnome and Kopete from kde. These communicators had literaly dozens of plugins enabling different protocols/services. Might be worth checking out even though they are not explicitly listed as as supporting voip.

[pa4wdh]

I'm having a similar question. Basically i'd like to have a softclient to experiment with asterisk, but haven't been able to find a decent client. Around ~2018 linphone was still in the gentoo portage tree and it worked, but now that's gone too.
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My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
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[szatox]

pa4wdh, you can experiment with 3CX I mentioned earlier. It's not bad, but things get tricky when you want to add it to autostart and be available as soon as you switch your laptop on, without remembering to manually check if you're still logged into the telephone service.

[pa4wdh]

If you mean https://www.3cx.com i don't see how that would be a softclient?
Can you explain what you mean?
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world

My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com

[szatox]

Yeah, it's asterisk + their configuration tools and web client packed together as a single PBX solution. It lets you make phone calls from web browser via your self-hosted pbx.
3cx can and will talk to other clients too if you find them. The provided web client is essentially a stop-gap, it is fully featured, but you must remember to make sure you're logged in. Which was a pain in my use case, but may be fine in yours.

[gorg86]

I forgot about Jami https://jami.net/
Did anyone try it?

[szatox]

Sounds familiar, so I must have tried and failed, though I can't remember what went wrong.
I think it's in ring overlay. Anyway, if you manage to make it work, I might give it another shot too

[Hund]

What about Snikket? It's XMPP, but everything works out of the box.
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[Dragonix]

Hi,

you could give baresip a shot.
Link: https://github.com/baresip/baresip
ebuilds/overlay (outdated!): https://gpo.zugaina.org/net-voip/baresip

I haven't used it in the last two years, however, back then it was working (at least for my usecase). I think that I had some troubles building it, but I can't remember, sorry.

Good luck!
Matthias

[sokhapkin]

I use linphone appimage from linphone.org. Works fine.