Free phones software for linux

Linphone is a web phone that it let you phone to your friends anywhere in the whole world, freely, simply by using the internet. The cost of the phone call is the cost that you spend connected to the internet.
To call somebody, you must provide to linphone a SIP URL : It is something like toto@machine.com, where toto is a linux user that runs linphone, and machine.com is the name of a host on a network. If you dont know the machines name you can specify simply an IP address in dot notation (as 192.0.0.1)
Linphone is mostly sip compliant. It works successfully with these implementations:
- eStara softphone (commercial software for windows)
- Pingtel phones (with DNS enabled and VLAN QOS support disabled).
- Hotsip, a free of charge phone for Windows.
- Vocal, an open source SIP stack from Vovida that includes a SIP proxy that works with linphone since version 0.7.1.
- Siproxd is a free sip proxy being developped by Thomas Ries because he would like to have linphone working behind his firewall. Siproxd is simple to setup and works perfectly with linphone.
- Partysip aims at being a generic and fully functionnal SIP proxy. Visit the web page for more details on its functionalities.
Linphone may work also with other sip phones, but this has not been tested yet.
Linphone uses the SIP protocol to establish calls, for that reason it cannot work with H323 phones, because SIP and H323 are different and opposite protocols. H323 phones are Netmeeting (for windows), Gnome-meeting (Unix), OpenPhone...
Main features:
- Works with the Gnome Desktop under linux, (maybe some others Unixes, but this has never been tested). Nevertheless you can use linphone under KDE, of course !
- Since version 0.9.0, linphone can be compiled and used without gnome, in console mode, by using the program called "linphonec"
- Works as simply as a cellular phone. Two buttons, no more.
- Linphones includes a large variety of codecs (G711-ulaw, G711-alaw, LPC10-15, GSM, and SPEEX). Thanks to the Speex codec it is able to provide high quality talks even with slow internet connections, like 28k modems.
- Understands the SIP protocol. SIP is a standardised protocol from the IETF (http://www.ietf.org), that is the organisation that made most of the protocols used in the internet. This guaranties compatibility with most SIP - compatible web phones.
- You just require a soundcard to use linphone.
- Other technical functionnalities include DTMF (dial tones) support though RFC2833 and ENUM support (to use SIP numbers instead of SIP addresses).
- Linphone is free software, released under the General Public Licence.
- Linphone is documented: there is a complete user manual readable from the application that explains you all you need to know.
- Linphone includes a sip test server called "sipomatic" that automatically answers to calls by playing a pre-recorded message.
Enhancements:
- This version fixes a compilation error, an incorrect icon path and updates the cz translation.

Gnome-o-phone (gphone for short) is an internet telephone. In other words, if you and your friend have computers with sound cards and network connections, you can use gphone to talk to each other and save on phone bills. Gphone is definitely a work in progress and you probably shouldnt bet your business on it; if it breaks you can keep both pieces. Dont be too hard on the program, though -- the user interface is a bit rough but gphone does work pretty well.
As the name implies, it aims to be fully gnome-groovy, but that hasnt quite happened yet. Gphone is definitely a work in progress and you probably shouldnt bet your
business on it. Dont be too hard on the program, though -- although the user interface is mighty rough, gphone does actually work pretty well. Ive only tested the program over ethernet, but the data rate should be low enough to work over a reasonable modem connection.
The protocol is nominally RTP/RTCP, and gphone complies well enough with the standard to be able to talk to speakfreely. Ive only tested the UNIX version of speakfreely, but as long as you tell sfmike to use RTP and GSM compression, it seems to work fine. Maybe someday Ill add in support for other codecs; encryption is a little less likely
because Id just as soon not open that legal can of worms. One easy way to get some security would be to modify my program rtptunnel to tunnel the RTP protocol through a SSL socket instead of a straight TCP socket.
Gphone supports full duplex if your sound card has this feature. Ive had good luck using the ALSA drivers for my SB16.
Enhancements:
- gphone/gphone.c: Add Jorge Gomes Silvas patch to fix config button crash.

mp3CONVERT is a Kommander wizard for easy encoding mp3 songs. For example, when you need get your favourite album, which has 100mb to the cell phone with 40mb memory.

ObexFS project is a FUSE-based filesystem using OBEX to access the memory on mobile phones.

FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) is a simple interface for userspace programs to export a virtual filesystem to the linux kernel. FUSE also aims to provide a secure method for non privileged users to create and mount their own filesystem implementations.

FUSE is made up of three main parts:

- A kernel filesystem module (kernel/fuse.o)

- A userspace library (lib/libfuse.a)

- A mount/unmount program (util/fusermount)

Heres how to create your very own virtual filesystem in five easy steps (after installing FUSE):

1) Edit the file example/fusexmp.c to do whatever you want...

2) Build the fusexmp program

3) run example/fusexmp /mnt/whatever -d

4) ls -al /mnt/whatever

5) Be glad

If it doesnt work out, please ask! Also see the file include/fuse.h for detailed documentation of the library interface.

You can also mount your filesystem like this:

fusermount /mnt/whatever example/fusexmp -d

The fusermount program now accepts a couple of additional options. Run it with the -h option to see a description.

OBEX Send to Phone service menu allows for sending any file(s) to a mobile phone equipped with OBEX stack.

It is made for Nokia S60 (6630 to be precise) phone with USB connection. There are no settings, no progress indicator. Files are copied to the memory card (E: drive)

Requires openobex and obexftp.

Hope this script might be useful for someone. Please post fixes, comments and suggestions.

Phone for voice modem is only a simple wrapper for the chat program, which allows you to call some numbers on the hayes-compatible modem.