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GNOME GUI Media Movies

Get to Know GnomeMeeting 144

JigSaw writes "OSNews has a nice review/introduction to GnomeMeeting discussing its setup, usage and features. Some screenshots are included."
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Get to Know GnomeMeeting

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  • Fear (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:44AM (#7608534)

    50% of the time they won't answer your call

    If you're wondering why, just look at what can greet you [osnews.com] if you dare answer.
    • Re:Fear (Score:1, Funny)

      by Pelorat ( 174667 )
      So *that's* what John Romero's been doing recently...
    • Re:Fear (Score:4, Funny)

      by SpaceRook ( 630389 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:57AM (#7608621)
      These strange creatures are called "women." Recent estimates say that they occupy about half the population these days.
    • Maybe she should apply for a job in the i'm-to-ugly-for-video-chat dept
    • FYI, that's OSNews editor Eugenia Loli-Queru.
    • Re:Fear (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      i think you better be look at the screenshot [gnomemeeting.org] again.

      Eugenia keep up the good work, dont let this jerks drove you from what really matters. Stuff for nerds of course :D

  • by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:46AM (#7608544)
    And the most important point of it all (from their FAQ [gnomemeeting.org]):

    2.2. Does it work with Netmeeting?
    Yes, GnomeMeeting is compliant with all H.323 products, software and hardware.


    At least the Windows users on the other end don't have to download any additional program, they can just continue to use what they did before...
    • Hmm.. funny... Microsoft plans to phase out [betanews.com]
    • and what if... (Score:2, Insightful)

      I'm a Windows user who wants to use it instead of NetMeeting??
    • This doesn't really work anymore AFAIK. Windows XP made Netmeeting obsolete, MSN msgr is the default nowadays. Nobody provides ILS services anymore, except probably the server in the FAQ..
    • At least the Windows users on the other end don't have to download any additional program, they can just continue to use what they did before...

      Yes, and this I find to be iChat AV's big weakness. If I can't connect to the vast majority of computer users, I can't really make use of it.

      Ideally, I'd like to see iChat AV start working with NetMeeting and also Messenger. It's an unavoidable fact of computing life that most of the people you'll be dealing with are going to be running Windows on the client.

      Ch

    • Not entirely true....
      <P>They do need to install GSM Codes compiled by the gnomemeeting.org team. These are slightly different than MSN's Codecs. Look at the last entry in their downloads section.<P>
      And the compatibility works only in theory. I have been trying to get this work since pre 0.90 days of gnomemeeting, without any luck. And no I am not behind a firewall, neither is the windows user. and none of us are natted and both have broadband connections.
    • Another important point from their FAQ is

      2.8. Does it support the T.120 protocol?

      No, T.120 support is not implemented in GnomeMeeting yet. We prefer to focus on videoconferencing features and protocols than to add support for T.120. Moreover, most T.120 features like desktop sharing, or file transferts can be easily achieved using other dedicated tools.

      Though it is the "official network meeting software" where I work, nobody I know uses Netmeeting for anything other than sharing their applications and/or
    • At least the Windows users on the other end don't have to download any additional program, they can just continue to use what they did before...

      Gnomeeting is bundled with the GNOME 2.4 Desktop
      GNOME user dont need to download anything if they already have GNOME Desktop

      Dont substitute Windows with Linux while comparing 2 type of desktop

      if we substitute "Windows" with "Gnome Desktop"
      your comment will be like this:-

      "At least the GNOME Desktop users on the other end don't have to download any additional pr
    • H.323 has serious problems with NAT and firewalls which are kind of hard to solve if you're not your own ISP. And the interoperability between two H.323 compliant products even from two different commercial vendors doesn't seem to be very good either.
  • by IamGarageGuy 2 ( 687655 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:51AM (#7608581) Journal
    Does this mean that all webcams will have to be pointed at a lower level and toward the garden. Gnomemeeting... Get it ... Ok I'll get back to work .....
  • More screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

    by Steve 'Rim' Jobs ( 728708 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:51AM (#7608587) Journal
    Have a look at the Gnome Meeting webpage [gnomemeeting.org]; there are many more screenshots there with some preferences and other parts of the app shown that don't appear in the OSNews article. -- Steve
  • by SlashDotAgent ( 700292 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:52AM (#7608593)
    when will it communicate with Skype?
  • ...as reported by CPD [sf.net].

    Here's the report [infoether.com].
  • by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:57AM (#7608625)
    I, for one, would like to welcome our new Gnome ..erm.. Underlords.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:03AM (#7608659)
    it could application share and or whiteboard with NetMeeting. I am sorry, but video conferencing is not novel, certainly not in 2003. Folks have been doing this since 1994 with CU-SeeMe, and vt et al. Cross paltform too, even before H.323.

    The largest collection of use cases for NetMeeting involves *no* video, and a lot of application sharing/viewing. I think we all know this. What are the obstacles to getting some kind of linux based solution (please dont say vmware or wine!) that truly can interact with NM on a peer level?
  • by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:05AM (#7608681) Homepage Journal
    ... a decent non-geek screenshot of a multimedia application that makes me *want* to use it:

    http://www.gnomemeeting.org/screenshots/latest/G no meMeeting_In_A_Call.png
  • The article suggested there was some firewall issues with this and I see this as a main step holding back videoconferencing.

    My parents recently had broadband installed and I advised them to get an ADSL router with firewall (and wireless) built in like I'm using. I then realised we both also have digital cameras which double as webcams so why phone each other when we can videoconference for free! However, a little research and everything I found used H.323 and required a range of thousands of ports to be op
    • Re:Firewall ports (Score:4, Informative)

      by silas_moeckel ( 234313 ) <silas.dsminc-corp@com> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:26AM (#7608820) Homepage
      I know this might be scary but your could just get a firewall thats understands H323 realy this has little to do with the application it's just the standard way to get it accross the internet if your "firewall" (use that term loosly for those home nat products) dosent support the standard fix it. More advanced firewalls read into the h323 packets and dynamicaly open ports for the remote site only.
    • Re:Firewall ports (Score:5, Informative)

      by Doug Dante ( 22218 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:29AM (#7608843)
      GnomeMeeting requires that you open no more than 17 ports for the "worst case" configuration.

      If your firewall supports H.323 forwarding and you only want to make outbound calls, you're done.

      Forward TCP port 1720 to your computer if you want to accept incomming calls.

      If your gateway doesn't support H.323 forwarding:

      Forward TCP port range [30000-30010]
      Forward UDP port range [5000-5003]

      99% of configurations are done here.

      If you're using a gatekeeper, you must also forward UDP port range [5010-5013].

      That's 17 ports in the worst case.

      Here's the link in the FAQ.

      http://www.gnomemeeting.org/index.php?rub=3&pos= 0& faqpage=x269.html
      • Re:Firewall ports (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheSync ( 5291 )
        This is why Netmeeting and other H.323 solutions should be thrown on the trash heap.

        In this day and age, the vast majority of people with high-speed connections are behind NATed DSL & cable routers. If your solution can't handle NAT, it is almost useless.

        Right now, I consider Yahoo Messenger the only realistic solution. Sightspeed is nice as well, especially for higher-speed connectivity, but costly.
        • This is why Netmeeting and other H.323 solutions should be thrown on the trash heap.

          This is why NAT should be thrown on the trash heap.

          If your solution can't handle NAT, it is almost useless.

          If NAT breaks solutions, then it is almost useless.

          There are certain rules for providing internet access, defined 23 years ago in RFC 760 [ietf.org] (etc). NAT breaks those rules. If you use NAT, you don't have Internet access. If you don't have Internet access, you shouldn't expect Internet applications to work.
          • This is why Netmeeting and other H.323 solutions should be thrown on the trash heap.

            This is why NAT should be thrown on the trash heap.

            No, this is why your ISP who *still* doesn't suport IPv6 should be thrown on the trash heap. There are just not enough IP addresses available for everyone to put all of their network-ready machines on the internet. More addresses would help, or a stopgap like NAT would help. Guess which one has become the standard solution, and must be worked around? That's the sa

            • I hate NAT myself, don't get me wrong. However, I believe that today NAT is viewed as much of a security feature as well as an IP-conserver.

              I'm not sure that NAT orovides a lot of security, but it certainly means that a firewall somewhere HAS to be involved in communications between the target machine and the outside world.
          • Then again, my ISP charges an another $10-$15 for an extra IP address... I'll keep NAT for now. :)
      • You should try iptables/netfilter for your nat machine. There is a H.323 module available in the patch-o-matic.

        http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO/net fi lter-extensions-HOWTO-5.html#ss5.3

        -molo
  • by hungryfrog ( 624114 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:14AM (#7608740)
    I traded a few e-mails last year with Damien (the lead developer). He said a Windows port was being actively worked on and was just a few weeks/months off. Anyone heard anything on this? I was hoping to use GnomeMeeting in our office, where there's no chance of switching to Linux desktops anytime soon.
  • 1. Gnome. 2. ?????. 3. Profit.
  • by acomj ( 20611 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @11:41AM (#7608962) Homepage
    Noticed that it doesn't work with macos X ichat. I noticed that during his introduction S jobs indicated ichat was built using opensource, so my question is how hard would it be to get it to work with ichat?
  • What are the options for video teleconferencing between Windows and Linux? I use Linux at home, but my parents two states away are Windows users. We've been trying to use Gnomemeeting/Netmeeting for several months now with mixed sucess. It seems that most of the problems seem to be on the Netmeeting end, but with Microsoft retiring Netmeeting [infoworld.com] there's little hope to get this resolved and Netmeeting doesn't appear to be a viable choice for the future. Are there any other options out there?
  • i'm-to-ugly-for-video-chat dept

    Don't see the problem? It's TOO ugly for video chat, not TO. What is the educational system in this country coming to when people can't even tell the difference between too and to? Do UK/Canadian/non us people have this problem too?
  • by molo ( 94384 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @12:43PM (#7609584) Journal
    The best feature of gnomemeeting is that it supports 1394 AV/C cameras (aka DV camcorders). That means you can plug in you standard firewire camcorder and use that as your webcam! This requires a recent (and maybe customized) build, but it works quite well.

    -molo
  • Enlarge the screenshots. Look at the chat panes. Basically all they're chatting about is how to get the software to work. Talk about threadjacking! It's worse -- meetingjacking.

    If your meeting software transforms your meeting into a multipoint tech support video conference, the software is not ready for primetime.

    The software needs to be invisible - it can't impede the act of having the meeeting in any way. Currently no solution, including NetMeeting, truly achieves this goal.

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why _GNOME_ Meeting? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @02:07PM (#7610475) Homepage Journal
    I tried to get GNOMEMeeting a couple of years ago. Back then, my harddisk space was limited and I used Slackware. This means that I got to think twice before installing any software, because of the space constraints, and because of the effort in configuring, compiling and installing a package and every single dependency.

    I had been able to get by without GNOME and KDE; most apps I used being GTK+ apps that could be compiled with or without GNOME. Not GNOMEMeeting. However, I figured that I could install the GNOME libraries and get not only GNOMEMeeting, but also some mighty cool features in my other apps...after all, there had to be a reason why people use the GNOME libraries, right?

    Well, for some reason I don't remember I couldn't or wouldn't install GNOME from packages. So of I went to download, configure, compile and install every single component. Eventually I had a working GNOME install.

    And then I got stuck...it turned out I also needed some libraries to support H.323, but couldn't get them compiled due to lack of virtual memory - I had 384 MB, which is exactly what the manual said I would need, but apparently was just not enough. Eventually I managed to compile the framework in debug mode - why this takes _less_ memory I still fail to see.

    Compiling GNOMEMeeting was complicated by lots of errors apparently caused by the version of OpenH323 I had installed not being quite what GNOMEMeeting expected. Finally I managed to get everything installed and working...and then it turned out that GNOMEMeeting didn't work nearly as well as I had expected it to. In many cases, it just wouldn't connect. Judging from the article, not much has changed in that respect, although I am pleased to see that GM works with NAT now.

    Now you may see the above as me blaming GM for Slackware lacking a good packaging system (mostly suffering from the lack of packages made for it), and that is indeed one source of the hardships I encountered. But I am asking you, and I seriously wonder, why does GM need GNOME? The way I see it, all it has to do is grab video and audio, encode it, and send it over the network, and play the video and audio it receives over the network. To my knowledge, none of these things require GNOME, nor are they easier to implement using GNOME. Am I wrong?
  • gnomemeeting: error while loading shared libraries: libldap.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  • Eugenia Loli-Queru:the microphone
    Stela Korakaki:ok
    Eugenia Loli-Queru: giving
    Eugenia Loli-Queru:yeah pretty good
    Eugenia Loli-Queru:i hear that good stuff
    Stela Korakaki:

  • WHY are there so many though!? There is no need for this!

    We only need ONE protocol, not 20
    (AIM ICQ IRC YAHOO MSN SKYPE JABBER GABBER and lots lots more)
    for each of the following functions!:
    1. Text
    2. Audio (open H.323)
    3. Video

    Haven't we been playing this game too long? The Internet is supposed to be an information commute, not a traffic jam. Why can't we STANDARDIZE it!? bah! (XML would be nice)
  • they refer to it as an instant messenger...
    it's a VOIP client.. the creator of gnome meeting has even stated this.

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

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