Wengo – I can’t hear you!

20 06 2006

WengoThis doesn’t seem to be my day. I tried to use Wengo as an alternative to Skype, however I failed miserably. As soon as I start it I get an audio error. Appearantly it doesn’t open /dev/dsp, while other applications don’t seem to have that problem. At least I’m not alone. ;-)


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2 responses

20 06 2006
Marc

Bleh. I was hoping one of these days to use Skype on my Ubuntu system, but people said that it’s flakey and you need some Skype DSP Hijacker program. Sounds like a mess. Although I haven’t tried it yet – perhaps they’ve already worked out all the kinks? Heh, probably not, since you’re looking at alternatives like Wengo? :-)

20 06 2006
Martin

Hi Marc, thanks for your comment. Actually I think Skype might run quite smoothly on Ubuntu – after all it did so on SuSE. However, it’s true, it doesn’t support ALSA – just plain OSS. That shouldn’t be a problem, though, as long as you don’t play any other sound while firing Skype up. Why am I looking for a replacement? It’s obvious that Skype has lost the interest in the Linux community. There have been lots of cool features added to the Windows version of Skype like conference calls or video. The Linux version hasn’t changed in a long time. And it doesn’t seem to me like they are going to improve ALSA support any time soon. I’d be glad to be mistaken on this. Anyway, an OpenSource alternative to Skype would be just perfect at this point.

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