Joe Barr provides an insight about his experiences in installing, configuring and using Ekiga for Linux.com. Ekiga is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME. Ekiga uses both the H.323 and SIP protocols. Used to be known as Gnomemeeting when I was first experimenting on it, Ekiga definitely has come a long way.

Mr. Barr quips

"Video quality was very good, the only caveat being that when my colleague moved quickly, I saw pixellation. I could hear my colleague well, but she complained of low volume from my end. This proved to be a problem with my audio set up, not a fault of SIP or Ekiga. I corrected it by activating Mic Boost in my sound card via using the alsamixer. But as good as the audio quality was at my end, it was not as good as I remember Skype being a couple of years ago, when I first tried SIP."

It obviously needs help in testing and also in software development. If you can spare some time and/or brain cells, please do join the community.

Since I no longer have a decent webcam for my Linux box, I stick with iChatAV and Skype on my Mac. :)