On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 3:41 PM, IntrosMedia
<introsmedia@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm a Trisquel GNU/Linux user and tried to use Ekiga since I moved from proprietary to libre software, but no luck.
Since libre XMPP clients started to support audio calls, I started using that and it just works for me. I've used it to communicate with people on Windows using google talk and it work fine. I use Empathy.
Thanks for your report! I guess I need to just spend a bit more time choosing and testing either a SIP or XMPP/Jingle client that will work for my particular system, and then test it with the people I need to talk to. I'm disappointed Empathy didn't work the first time, but maybe it was just some config issue, or a firewall on the other end.
Nevertheless, I still think it is important to promote SIP or XMPP for voice talk (and probably to pick one as preferred!) and to combat the network effect, as discussed on that thread.
I am a programmer, I'm willing to help with bug reports and maybe even hacking.
Where should I direct my efforts?
Thanks,
Ramana
P.S. It was my plan to eventually convince Chinesepod to change its default. But that is definitely not viable at the moment! Maybe if everything had gone smoothly it would have been. I still hope they will eventually use and recommend free software, but I would only feel comfortable asking them to switch when I know it works.
The other program I had to remove when I switched to Parabola was the Adobe Flash plugin, which I was using with Skritter.com to learn Chinese writing. I've since just stopped using Skritter (and hence stopped learning how to write). I plan to use the free learning tool Anki to keep up with learning characters, but for writing I really hope Lightspark or GNU Gnash will be able to run Skritter soon. (Or that someone writes a free version of Skritter that isn't based on Actionscript.) I started submitting bug reports to Lightspark, but I feel like not enough people are working on it... consider this another call for help.
I really don't know if hanzi and kanji have the same stroke order, but take a look at KanjiVG project. I remember I saw a project based on it using HTML canvas to practice writing, so if you are a programmer you may find it useful to write your own tool.
Thank you very much for that link! Hanzi does use the same stroke order, but I am more interested in Simplified characters (I think Kanji correspond to traditional characters). But this project looks extensible enough to allow a Hanzi database as well, and could be a great source of material for a libre Skritter replacement.
--
Felipe Lopez
IntrosMedia