Navaho Gunleg

My ISP (XS4ALL) is currently providing its clients with 1 or 2 optional VoIP numbers. I would’ve never imagined I would be setting VoIP up at home, but the mythical convergence box in my living room has VoIP capabilities — so why the hell not? (Why does a dog lick its balls?)

As VoIP calls are a bit cheaper as well I thought it would be worth taking a shot at. So I registered my first number, one that doesn’t cost me a single dime (I can only get called on that number). Of course, running linux and shit, one has always have to be careful choosing because it could sure as hell be that some thing ain’t supported because vendors don’t produce shit for the sake of the produce, but for the sake of keeping on selling it. But I digress — only slightly.

Now — being able to call out and in would of course be cool.. But it would be even cooler if I set up a little PBX-kind of thing so I can have phone extensions throughout my house (it’s not that big though, mind you). It would be cool if I was able to dial the upstairs desktop by dialing 666, some something.

Having worked in the phone-communications business I knew about Asterisk, the open source PBX software (actually the same that Kevin Mitnick used at one point to spoof his caller-ID), but only a few days ago I read that it could do SIP — the protocol VoIP phones ‘do’ — as well.

So — a couple of days ago I downloaded it and setting it up — without the actual dialing in and out — was actually a breeze.

It took some research — and some patience to finally set it all up though.

Luckily, I could find ‘working’ examples of sip.conf and extensions.conf which ought to do the trick, but I shouldn’t have tinkered with my modems’ port forwarding settings at the same time. I could spoonfeed you and dump my configurations here, but a google search using the queries “xs4all +asterisk +voip” should put you on the right path, my grasshopper.

Decent VoIP/SIP clients for Linux
Well — there aren’t any. There are plenty of applications that claim they are though.

My ISP links to a program called X-Lite; available for Linux as well. It works, but its kinda bloaty and it looks more fancy than it has features.

The X-Lite thing is, well, close, but it’s too much of a Windows program; it makes me feel like I’m back behind Windows 95 with some software whose idiot author just found out that windows don’t have to be rectangular. Also, anything that displays something that seem like pointer addressess, well, I rest my case….

Speaker, Microphone and Ringing device show very weird device names.

Note that there are other programs, some of which look pretty good, but they are simply too big a pain to install. I don’t mind the odd dependency, but dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency … Let’s just say I have my limits…

Just at the moment I almost came to the conclusion that there is no source-libre version of a decent SIP client — I discovered another program, written by another Dutch guy, it seems. *cheers*

The program’s called Twinkle and although it looks pretty basic; it does all that I require. It even has a decent sound configuration screen:

Twinkle’s audio configuration screen.

Concluding; it seems that Twinkle‘l be the thing I’ll use for VoIP communications, at least for the time being.

Asterisk, VoIP, XS4ALL, Netherlands