Category: GNU/Linux

Those who are used to VoIP and internet phone might already familiar with Ekiga, an open source VoIP client for Linux and Windows operating system.

Formerly known as GnomeMeeting, Ekiga allows you to place call and hold video conferencing session with any VoIP client that supports SIP and H323 protocol, including Microsoft Netmeeting, Gizmo, Linphone and XMeeting.

Ekiga allows you to call ordinary phone number at affordable rate via its PC-to-Phone account, all you need to do is to purchase Ekiga PC-to-Phone credits and you’re ready to call any phones in the world!

Stuck behind NAT? Ekiga enable you to talk over the internet even when your router does not support SIP/H323. The configuration druid will automatically detect your network connection and configures itself to adapt to your network environment.

Here are some Ekiga’s Screenshots

Interesting Ekiga Phone Numbers
You might notice I dialed ‘500’ in my Ekiga. Well that’s the number for an Ekiga echo service useful for testing your software setup. Here are some interesting Ekiga numbers for you to try.

• sip:500 – audio and video echo test
• sip:501 – conference room
• sip:530 – talking clock
• sip:*266303 – some music
• sip:*266300 – monkey sound

Contact Me on Ekiga
You might also want to contact me using Ekiga at sip:mypapit@ekiga.net, I’m pretty open for some quick conversation or a helo.

p/s: I wrote this post as a respond to one of my blog readers request for me to write a post on Ekiga. Please refer to Howto Install Skype on Ubuntu if you’re more interested in Skype.

p/s 2: Base on my personal experience, I found Skype voice quality and service is noticeably more superior than Ekiga or Gizmo, your mileage may vary however

[tags]ekiga,voip,skype,internet,phone,linux,open source[/tags]

Pocket PC is perhaps the most widely known PDA device available to general consumers, although it comes with Microsoft Windows CE, it still does not stop GNU/Linux users from syncing their Pocket PC device with Linux machines.

In this post, I’ll concentrate on developing Pocket PC application on Linux machine by using CeGCC.

First of all you need to install CeGCC cross compiler on your system by either

1. Compiling CeGCC from its source code, or
2. Installing it from Binary Package (rpm, deb)

For this quick introduction, I’ll concentrate on installing the compiler from Debian Package (deb). Other packages can be downloaded from CeGCC project page

Get the Deb package

• cegcc-cegcc_0.50-2_i386.deb (21MB)
• cegcc-mingw32ce_0.50-2_i386.deb (19MB)

Install both packages
Install both mingw32ce and cegcc using dpkg,


$ sudo dpkg -i cegcc-mingw32ce_0.50-2_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i cegcc-cegcc_0.50-2_i386.deb


the package files will be installed on /opt.

Download Example Source Code

• hello.c – Display Hello world dialog
• randrect.cpp – Random Rectangle

Compiling the application
To compile the example applications, you need to change the directory to “/opt/cegcc/bin/“, then execute

$ ./arm-wince-cegcc-gcc ~/hello.c -o ~/hello.exe


Copy hello.exe to your Pocket PC PDA, and execute it using File Explorer to see it running. Repeat the step for “Random Rectangle” example.

Conclusion
CeGCC is a great package for Pocket PC mobile application development as it produces binaries that are compatible with modern ARM processor and Windows Mobile operating system. CeGCC enables Pocket PC application development under a completely free and open source environment

[tags]pocketpc, pocket pc, linux, ubuntu, gcc, compiler, c#, pda,mobile,gadgets[/tags]

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol responsible for keeping your computer time in sync (Standard Time) with the rest of the world. Keeping up with standard time with the rest of the world proves to be useful when you’re interacting with the rest of computers across the world.

Here’s how to manually update your computer time to syncronise with NTP, from the terminal run ‘ntpdate’ command


sudo ntpdate europe.pool.ntp.org north-america.pool.ntp.org


If you live in South-East Asia like me, you can synchronize your computer time with the Malaysian/SIngapore NTP server


sudo ntpdate 3.asia.pool.ntp.org 1.asia.pool.ntp.org


Note that the synchronizing process is usually done automatically by the operating system when the computer is connected to the internet. This command is useful if you wish to synchronize your computer manually when you’re connected to internet.

[tags]ntpd,ntp,ubuntu,debian[/tags]