http://www.osnews.com/story/5280/Get_to_Know_GnomeMeeting Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:05:28 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? GnomeMeeting is from my experience at least the best in its class for Linux.

BTW:, Eugenia, now you've reviewed four gnome applications ans still none that are kde/qt, can we expect that you will review KDE 3.2 to make it a bit more even? I mean a really good review of KDE 3.2, that goes into a lot of depth and explores the flagship applications and that explores with a critical eye as most of your reviews tend to. It would also be great if you could provide a partial comparrison between it and the latest stable GNOME release at that time. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, I am planning to do a KDE 3.2 review when it is out, but please keep the discussion on topic. Read tomorrow my JDS review where I mention KDE on JDS btw. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Microsoft's video/audio conferencing junk (especially with MSN Messenger) switched to dynamic ports, which makes it nearly impossible for hardware firewall/router/gateway devices to allow such traffic.

It REALLY annoys me. Anyone know of good Win32 alternatives? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? just curious to know if you have had a chance to try yahoo's voice/video conferencing (especially in super mode), and how it compares with Gnomemeeting, MSN & iChat/iSight. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, Yahoo is "ok" but the super-mode never works. At least not for me, even when I am directly IP-to-IP. The normal mode is so-so. I think MSN's video works better than Yahoo!. The best of all is iSight/iChat though. There is no parallel to the usability, performance, ease of use and setup. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That's great to hear =)

Also, I too think that it is essential for GNOMEMeeting to interoperate with other popular software on Windows, because without doing so it is limited to the minuscule market share that Linux has, unless of course Linux takes over the world overnight Interoperability would open GNOMEMeeting users to a far larger number of people, make it much more useful for businesses and much more widespread. Unfortunately, doing this is also very costly in terms of development time.

Last note that is offtopic: I thought JDS or more appropriately named SDS, (Why Java? Its just branding.) was GNOME only and also it is supposed to be released this month right? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 06:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, there is no KDE on JDS, and this is why I mention it. Now please stop the off topic discussion because it draws people to reply on that stuff. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree that for it to really take off it needs to be merged into gaim. It's just not at the modern day level of convienience to need to open a seperate program depending on if you want text or video chat. I've never used Gnomemeeting(no webcam), but what kind of video quality/bandwidth usage does it have? Last time I tried webcams(in 97) the video quality was terrible. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hi,

one short question: Does the Webcam "Creative Webcam Pro" really work with FreeBSD? I just had a look into the Hardware-List of 5.1 and didn't find it... Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, it does, this chipset which is used by many cameras (OmniVision OV511+) is supported by FreeBSD, at least when I tried it on FreeBSD 4.7. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Who's that guy on the picture? Is it your husban Eugenia? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No, I don't need to video conference with my husband, he is next to me.
That guy is Killian, he is with the Gnomemeeting developers and also friend of Stella's. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I thought you were cheating on ur hubby, with sancho Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No, I am a good girl and my JBQ is the sweetest guy in the world. Besides, why do you need to only think dirty of video conferencing? With iSight/iChat I have met some interesting tech people and also got back together with friends after years of "losing" eachother (e.g. ex-Be engineers who are now using OSX). Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I mostly wanted to use webcams to be in touch with my family in Greece, but unfortunately my brother's bandwidth sucks and we are never able to connect properly. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 07:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Gaim and Gnomemeeting should become one and the same project"

I agree 100% - or at the very least it should have indistinguishable interoperability. When I am chatting with friends on MSN Messenger it is sooooo easy to just click the webcam button and then the audio button and have both and not have to do anything else, it's just awesome.

I just wish the Gaim folks would worry less about being cross platform (that's the perception, maybe not the reality at this time). The gain for the relatively few users on Windows is not worth the loss of the GNOME platform integration and the inability to do webcam stuff.

Perhaps the GnomeMeeting folks could snag the GAIM source and do the integration there? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 08:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Gnomemeeting will incorrectly say that the other person doesn't run Gnomemeeting"

That happens when the person has not unregistered from ILS or when a firewall blocks his incoming port.

"Gaim and Gnomemeeting should become one and the same project. Having such a small community of 200 users is"

I have to disagree here. You are not forced to register on ILS for being able to use GnomeMeeting. Recent polls have shown that most users do not use ILS to get in touch with they family or friends.

Also, don't forget GnomeMeeting is a VoIP/IP Telephony application with videoconferencing features, while iChat is an IM application with videoconferencing features. The big difference is that GnomeMeeting can be used as softphone in companies and infrastructures using Voice Over IP, and things like MCU's, gatekeepers, IPBX'es like Asterisk or commercial ones, ... Integrating it with something like gaim, and having something as simple as iChat, would mean loosing all those features. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 08:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Gonomeeting proved to be unstable in some setups

H.323 interoperability with Gatekeepers not so good

H.263 (H.263 Annex F and so on, not there!)


To Eugenia .. this is a videoconference H.323 application .. you cannot compare it to GAIM at all.
BTW this is the only VDCa pp for unix h.323 based, no need to marge it with IM apps.

IM is becoming the fuure .. but there is the ned for Gnome Meeting to grow and follow standards.

Today SIP is a mess ... drafts drafts for everything ... Tue, 02 Dec 2003 08:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Gonomeeting proved to be unstable in some setups

H.323 interoperability with Gatekeepers not so good

Can you explain further? have you discussed it with developers?

H.263 (H.263 Annex F and so on, not there!)

That's patented! Tue, 02 Dec 2003 09:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If they distinctions don't matter to the most users then it's probably not a useful distinction. I think most users don't care about the distinctions between Gnomemeeting and Gaim mentioned so far. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 09:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Stella is hot. Geek hotties are the best. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 09:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have to say that I don't understand Christian's comment about gatekeepers. I have been using GnomeMeeting since early versions with gatekeepers (I have even been using it before there was a gatekeeper support actually) and it has always worked very smoothly.
I (my company) use a commercial gatekeeper (manufactured by NetCentrex - RadVision stack) and the GnuGK (based on OpenH323) and both work great with GnomeMeeting. Besides, GnomeMeeting has H235 support, which allows it to securely authenticate to a GK, unlike most other VoIP products.
I also have to point out that GM has a Quicknet support, which allows a cheap analog phone to be plugged into your PC and thus provides a better voice compression quality, and an increased comfort of use.
Finally, GM supports call transfer, call hold etc, which makes it a definitive VoIP app.
Sorry if this post was longer than expected, I couldn't help filling the gaps left by the article (and its comments) :-) Tue, 02 Dec 2003 10:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia,
have You tried the macam Webcam drivers for OSX (http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net)? I got my unsupported Logitech webcam running. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 11:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The best bit about them teaming up would be they could drop the "G" and "Gnome". I've alwayas despised that trend - "Kthis, Gthis, GnomeThis" etc.

I know it is sad, i'm just particular about it. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 11:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? An alternative to MSN ? Well, for voice at least there is Skype, from the programmers that invented Kazaa. It uses p2p-technology for voice chatting. In other words, tunneling over the http-port and using people's upload to route the call. It is a hype, haven't tried it myself though... Audio quality is meant to be good but i dunno muc more...

Simon Tue, 02 Dec 2003 12:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I just wanted to add that a plugin infrastructure for gnomemeeting should be developed for any *nix messenger client. Not just Gaim. Last time I heard Gaim isn't part of the GNOME project, and isn't interested in becoming a part of it.

Since most *nix projects are designed to be modular, Gaim included, I see very few obstacles in designing a GnomeMeeting plugin infrastructure for any most of the messenger clients. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 12:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? would be a good idea for the next gnome bounty-hunt (but might be costly, though...) Tue, 02 Dec 2003 12:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Please note that you don't need a webcam to use GnomeMeeting. It's meant to be useful for Voice-Over-IP as well as video conferencing. You just need a microphone and speakers for that - which you'll find on just about every laptop. So you can use it, for instance, to make cheap international phone calls. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? but Eugenia looks different in every picture i see of her, completely different from the picture on her personal website or the ones when she tested the iSight some time ago. But still pretty in all of them though Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Many people are still confusing GnomeMeeting with an Instant Messenger. I have reacted to this in my blog and explained why it was different, and why it will stay different. You can read it here : http://www.advogato.org/person/dsandras Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't think they need to merge. But a plug-in for gaim that takes your IP address start gnomemeting and send and invitation to the othe gaim/msm user to start using gnomeeting/netmeeting would be nice... Cause frankly my relatives and fiends say: 'Ah?' When I ask them their IP address.
Someone mail the gaim developers please Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? GNOMEMeeting is one of those apps that I might use if it didn't depend on GNOME. I can grab from V4L devices and encode to MPEG (or another format) just fine without GNOME. Then why does GM require me to install all those libraries?

Perhaps someone would be interested in starting a project to implement a simple video chat app that Just Works and doesn't depend on anything besides what it actually needs? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What useless dependancies? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 14:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Please tell me I am not the only one that sees a spooky similarity between Eugenia and another famous free software celebrity:

http://darq.net/~kaneda/spooky.jpg

Hmm! Tue, 02 Dec 2003 15:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? He he, your bad.

They're both strong of will.

In any case. How well does GM do on low-bandwith connections, like dialup? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 15:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? be prepaied for a slashdotting, i was just over there and they linked OSNews in a discussion about this article... Tue, 02 Dec 2003 15:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Gnome is needed for all those fancy widgets, hence the name GNOMEMeeting. If you were too remove those dependencies you'd have one ugly looking app, think Unix Acrobat Reader.

/me shudders Tue, 02 Dec 2003 15:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Marratech tools might be a good alternative. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux and handled NAT/FW "perfectly". Client is free. http://www.marratech.com/ Download a client and then go to emeetingportal.com and chat with your friends! Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Man, those are some really fugly people in the screen shots! Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm not sure where this info came from but as of Windows XP you can just

Start->Run->conf

and there is netmeeting. MS hid netmeeting in order to get more people to subscribe to MSN and other services they are providing with netmeeting support. RDesktop would be sort of equivalent and a cool feature too Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Could somebody point to a really current list of webcams that work with this package. It might make a good addendum to the review as well.

Bo Tue, 02 Dec 2003 19:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? strange you quote the de facto leader .. radvision ...
becouse I am certified in all the RVSN products ...

founds some issues

radvision stack = 85% of the market

pleaae no flames about opensource stacks now! Tue, 02 Dec 2003 20:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? there is not H.263 .. and FFMPEG is supporting it .. is it only a matter of patent pending so? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I did not want to give a bad impression on Gnomeeting with my comments .. here we find it a really good application especially considering that it is OSS ad H.323 is not an easy task.

Will send some feedback to the developers willing to help a bit. Tue, 02 Dec 2003 22:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone know if GnomeMeeting works with Freeworlddialup? Tue, 02 Dec 2003 22:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? iVisit

http://www.ivisit.com/ Wed, 03 Dec 2003 00:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://myphone.sourceforge.net/

btw, regarding article & issue of small user base of gnomemeeting, netmeeting, etc.
Luckily, here MSN Messenger never became popular - so if someone is videoconferencing she/he uses netmeeting. OTOH it doesn't mean much - webcams aren't very popular, and "official" local videoconferencing server usually has something like 100 users anyway Wed, 03 Dec 2003 09:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? GnomeMeeting should be able to join those "NetMeeting" servers, which you can find friends there. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 10:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you're talking this to me, QnA...that was exactly my point - it is good that MSN isn't popular, and Netmeeting is - it causes some kind of "standarization" and interoperability :> Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm using Gnomemeeting every week to connect to my parents who have Netmeeting that came with WindowsME (like many others) It works perfectly. Even though it goes to a NAT router on one side and a firewall at the other side. There is a gnomemeeting option to force Netmeeting to use certain ports.

I'm not in the directory as I'm neither willing to chat - not to expose my IP - only conferencing.

Conrad Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments