Install Ekiga 3 on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

I always was worried about Skype closed-source code, but after reading this article about "NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution", I became almost paranoid... Happilly there is nice and free open-source apps availiable, like Ekiga.

Ekiga is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application, using H.323 and SIP protocols, suporting many audio and video codecs. You can read some good reviews here and here.



Ekiga 3.1 it has major improvements as support for the G.722 audio codec (HD voice), better notifications and more efficient memory handling. Even with all this advantages, Ubuntu 8.10 ships with the old and ugly Ekiga 2.0. Ok, I known that Ekiga 3.1 is a beta version, but what about Canonical choose of Pulse-Audio 0.9.10 that f***ed my system audio???

Well, there is no shinny ekiga 3.1 deb packages on the ubuntu repositories to update from, so we have to install it from sources. To make this process pain-free I made a script to automate the download-compile-install based on this, this and this pages. So, here it goes:

cd /tmp
#install ptlib
wget -c ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/ptlib/2.5/ptlib-2.5.2.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ptlib-2.5.2.tar.bz2 && cd ptlib-2.5.2
./configure --enable-sunaudio=no --enable-oss=yes --prefix=/usr --disable-sdl --disable-avc --disable-dc --enable-v4l
make && make install
checkinstall -D -y --pkgname="libpt-2.5.2"
#install opal
apt-get install libspeex-dev libx264-dev libtheora-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev x264
wget -c ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/opal/3.5/opal-3.5.2.tar.bz2 && tar xjf opal-3.5.2.tar.bz2 && cd opal-3.5.2
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-localspeex --enable-sip --enable-h323 --enable-video
make && make install
checkinstall -D -y --pkgname="libopal-3.5.2"
#install ekiga-snapshot
apt-get install autoconf automake docbook-utils evolution-data-server-dev gettext gnome-common gnome-doc-utils intltool libavahi-client-dev libavahi-common-dev libavahi-glib-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libebook1.2-dev libgconf2-dev libgnome2-dev libgnomeui-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libxml++2.6-dev libxml2-utils libxml-parser-perl libxv-dev libxvmc-dev scrollkeeper xsltproc
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/ekiga/trunk ekiga
cd ekiga
sed -i -e 's/GNOME="disabled"/GNOME="enabled"/g' -e 's/NOTIFY="disabled"/NOTIFY="enabled"/g' -e 's/XCAP="disabled"/XCAP="enabled"/g' -e 's/GSTREAMER="disabled"/GSTREAMER="enabled"/g'
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc/
make && make install
#checkinstall -D -y --pkgname="ekiga-snapshot"

Happy VoIP-ing!