Ajitabh Pandey's Soul & Syntax

Exploring systems, souls, and stories – one post at a time

Tag: Ekiga

  • Configuring ALSA On Debian Sarge

    I needed to configure ALSA on Sarge because I wanted to use Ekiga Softphone and although it supports OSS but the support is not good. It was fairly straight forward process to do that:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install libesd-alsa0 \ 
gstreamer0.8-alsa esound-clients alsa-base alsa-oss
ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo alsaconf

    In the alsaconf screens I answered all the defaults. And once I was done, under the menu item

    Applications→Desktop Preferences→Advanced→Multimedia Systems Selector

    I changed the default sink and default source to ALSA and Pipeline to alsasink and alsasrc respectively.

  • Backporting Ekiga Softphone

    Since I use apt-pinning it was quite easy for me to install Ekiga from the backports. The first thing which I needed to do was to configure ALSA on sarge.

    Next I just installed Ekiga as:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install ekiga
    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install libpt-plugins-alsa

    Next when I ran Ekiga I got an error saying “No usable audio plugin detected”. This was really annoying specially as I have all the required dependencies. Googling around helped me here and I found that the libpt-plugins-alsa needs to be installed from the backports repository and according to my pinning preferences it was installed from the sarge repository. So I had to do:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get -t sarge-backports install \
    libpt-plugins-alsa
    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get -t sarge-backports install \
    libpt-plugins-v4l2

    This uninstalled the installed libpt-plugins-alsa and install it from the sarge-backports repository.