Gmail Video Chat Now Available On Linux

borfast writes "If you use Gmail on Linux, you may have wondered when you would be able to use the voice and video chat that Windows and Mac users have enjoyed for quite some time. The wait is finally over; Google yesterday announced video support for Linux browsers. Now if only Pidgin could provide solid video chat functionality in their client..." According to the brief announcement on the Google blog, "Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon."

Empathy

[Tester]

Empathy has already supported XMPP video chats for years! And has been compatible with Google non-standard variant almost since it was announced.

Announcement?

[VincenzoRomano]

Sadly enough, I didn't get any ofthe usual announcement email from Google.
It's ridiculous that I have to read every day their blog in order to know the news about the services I'm using...

Re:Screenshots show Chrome...

[Anonymous Coward]

hopefully it'll work in Firefox too? I mean, Iceweasel?

It work too. I tested it with firefox right now.

Re:Empathy

[natehoy]

So does Pidgin, and has done for at least a few months. I'm not sure what the author of the summary was on about, I've had Gmail video chats between a Windows box and my wife's Linux box several times, her using Pidgin and me using the video chat client in Firefox.

Her eeePC has some microphone driver oddities we had to overcome in Linux (my one and only reason to drop to the command line in that install, turns out the eeePC identifies itself as having a stereo mic but only a mono is installed, and if signal comes in on both channels they cancel each other out, so you have to mute one of them), but the camera worked right out of the box in Linux Mint, and turning on video chat support in Pidgin was a matter of enabling the extension and using it, all in the Pidgin GUI.

In any case, it's nice to see it coming straight to the browser chat client.

Pidgin

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Now if only Pidgin could provide solid video chat functionality in their client...''

I honestly think the Pidgin team isn't that interested in such features. Video chat was coded for it years ago (back when it was still called Gaim), but that code was never adopted. I guess it just isn't a very big deal, or else I expect people would have switched to software that does do video chat, like the gaim-vv fork, Kopete, or AMSN. I don't see that happening, though. And Skype got by without video support for years, too. The world at large doesn't really seem to care about video chat.

Re:DIY

[dragin33]

My wife, a non-Linux user sat down with our Ubuntu 10 laptop last weekend to video chat over Skype. It worked great for the most part! However, after having the video in full screen mode the application hung and, unable to get out of full screen mode, effectively the computer was unusable and had to be power buttoned. At least it wasn't a totally bad Linux experience for my wife but I wish the Linux desktops and (more specifically) the applications that run on it were more stable!

Re:DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

CTRL+ALT+F1
username
password
killall skype

Re:Empathy

[Anonymous Coward]

The same with Nokia N900 since spring.

Re:DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back

to configure the cam, mic, and sound login and

[Locutus]

login to gmail and go to your "settings", select "chat" from the tabs of things to change and you'll see the "Voice and video chat" section where it'll list the three devices( camera, microphone, speakers ) and the drop down lists should show what devices your system has available. To my surprise, it does list the USB camera and microphone but I have not tested this yet.

Looks pretty good so far.

LoB

Re:DIY

[Fri13]

Ctrl+Alt+Esc and click the screen. Because the video was fullscreen, you could not miss it. This just would not work if the Xorg has crashed so the input devices does not work.

Re:ok knuckleheads

[orzetto]

$ alien --to-tgz google-talkplugin_current_amd64.deb