Gtalk voice chat using PSI !

I am using Ubuntu from a quiet a long now and use it most of the time at home ( office I can not install OS of my choice ! ). Almost everything I need works fine in Ubuntu, whether its office tools or dev tools or graphics, the only shortcoming is I was not able to use gtalk voice chat with my pidgin IM Client !

Every time I wanted to talk to my friends online, i would use Skype or switch to Windows and login to gtalk ! !

Recently I found out ( from some blogs and Forums) that PSI has come up with libjingle support which can be used to make voice calls using your google account.

Yesterday I tried it with my Ubuntu 8.04 and it worked seamlessly.
And here is how to configure and build PSI-libjingle

First Install, following packages using apt.

1. libqca & qca-dev
2. libqca-tls
3. libspeex, libspeex-dev & speex

qca: is Qt Cryptographic Architecture which provides a straightforward and cross-platform crypto API, using Qt datatypes and conventions (ref: http://delta.affinix.com/qca/)

libqca-tls is the SSL Support for libqca

speex : is an open-source patent free audio compression format designed for speech.

Then download and build ortp, a OpenSource rtp library.

# wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/linphone/ortp/sources/ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# tar zxvf ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# cd ortp-0.7.1
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/
# make ; make install
# sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libortp.so.0 /usr/lib/libortp.so.0

Now download psi-libjingle

# wget http://www.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/files/blog/psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# bunzip2 psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# tar -xvf psi-jingle.20060122.tar
# cd psi-jingle.20060122

# ./configure --enable-jingle --with-qca-inc=/usr/include/QtCrypto/ \
--with-qca-lib=/usr/lib/ \
--with-ortp-lib=/usr/lib/ --with-ortp-inc=/usr/include/ \
--with-glib-inc=/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0/ \
--with-glib-lib=/opt/gnome/lib/ \
--with-glibconfig-inc=/opt/gnome/lib/glib-2.0/include/ \
--with-speex-inc=/usr/include/speex/ --with-speex-lib=/usr//lib

Note: here most important is --enable-jingle otherwise, voice chat doesn't work!

# make ; make install

Once done, fire psi and configure your google account, start voice chatting !

One update to this :

Starting Ubuntu 10.04, Empathy became default IM client for Ubuntu desktop and Empathy support Gtalk voice out of the box !!!. So one need not worry about all the work around :)