Thursday, 20 January 2011

This is the homepage of the gtalX project. gtalX is a Linux client for gtalk, the voip application of Google. It supports voice and text-based chat.


This is the homepage of the gtalX project. gtalX is a Linux client for gtalk, the voip application of Google. It supports voice and text-based chat. Before you download it, please read the 'How to install' paragraph below.

You can download the latest released version of gtalX here (currently version 0.0.4).
You can download the latest unstable version of gtalX here (it won't even always build, but it includes the latest changes)

We are hosted on sourceforge, at this address: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtalx/.



Description

gtalX is based on the libjingle library (version 0.4.0) provided by Google. gtalX is implemented using QT 4.3. We have written gtalX on Zenwalk, one of the best Linux distributions. Download the live cd and give it a try!

The current stable version of gtalX is 0.0.4 (it is an alpha version). The currently implemented functionalities are:

* Login with your gmail account
* Voice chat with someone who has gtalX (under Linux) or Gtalk (under M$ Windows)
* Text chat with someone who has gtalX (under Linux) or Gtalk (under M$ Windows)
* Customizable chat icons
* Language support (translation to Hungarian and a chance to translate it to any other language)
* Taskbar icon (next to the clock)

Planned features for the next version are:

* File transfer (works in unstable! :-))
* Logging of user actions into a local log-file for easier bug reporting (of course without any personal data)

How to install on (K)Ubuntu 9.10

(Please let me know if you experience any problems with the packages!! My email address is in the Contact Us section below. I only got to test the deb files on KUbuntu 9.10.)

To install on 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 you can try this EXPERIMENTAL deb file (this installs today's snapshot of the unstable branch).
To install on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 you can try this EXPERIMENTAL deb file (this installs today's snapshot of the unstable branch).

The way to use the deb file:

sudo dpkg -i gtalx_0.0.5_i386.deb
# or if you have 64 bit Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i gtalx_0.0.5_amd64.deb

# you will get a dependency error after the above line so you'll need to execute this next:
sudo apt-get -f install

To remove this package execute:

sudo apt-get remove gtalx

How to build & install on most Linux distros

1. Install prerequisites

In general you'll need QT4, gcc and probably some other development packages that you need to build binaries on your system. If you want to upgrade to a new version, uninstall the old version first. I collected the dependency packages from Ubuntu, you'll need these libraries. Since you'll need to build gtalx, get development packages (if your distro has separate dev packages). Here is the list:

(build-essential)
libqt4-dev
libogg-dev
libtheora-dev
libsdl-dev
libavcodec-dev
libswscale-dev
libexpat1-dev
libraw1394-dev
libvorbis-dev
libgsm1-dev
libspeexdsp-dev
libmediastreamer0-dev
libortp-dev

For the ./make script to work properly I also needed the pkg-config package on Ubuntu.

If your distro has speex, mediastreamer2 and ortp (see the last 3 items in the above list) you can try what you get form there, but in general gtalx builds and installs these if your computer does not have them. There can easily be a version conflict here; if you are unsure and you do not use ubuntu, do not install these, let gtalx take care of them. Please make sure that you do not have ortp installed but mediastreamer2 not installed as these 2 are very closely related and mediastreamer2 will not build with versions of ortp that it does not expect. On Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10 it is safe to install the libmediastreamer0-dev and libspeexdsp-dev packages, on the rest either install speex, mediastreamer2 and ortp or none of these.

In my experience on Slackware 12 you'll simply need to install QT4.
On Zenwalk you'll need (use netpkg) qt4-devel*

2. Perform the build

* Extract the tar.gz file into any folder you like (tar -xvf .tar.gz)
* Change into the created directory, add execute permissions to ./make (chmod +x ./make) and run ./make

3. Install

* Become superuser (su, or use sudo)
* Execute ./make install

If all is ok, after these steps you can execute gtalX by typing gtalx at the command prompt (or you can start it from the start menu).

If you want to uninstall, you should execute the uninstall script as root from the directory where you called ./make install. Actually after you have installed gtalX successfully, you can delete all the source and build files, but please keep the uninstall script. The uninstall script alone will let you uninstall gtalX, you won't need any other files to do that.

If you use the unstable version then on Ubuntu instead of the ./make install step you can create a deb package by running
./make ubuntu
Then proceed as usual about installing a deb file (if unsure, see above)

Comment:

We test/use gtalX on Slackware, Zenwalk and Kubuntu. If you are using a different distro and gtalx does not build, or there is another problem, please let us know. If you have a fix for the problem, we would gladly and gratefully integrate that fix into the software, but we do not have the time to test this software on any other distributions. Still, we surely hope that it will work on more than these 3 ones. Actually we know that it works on gentoo, opensuse and fedora as well.

Screenshot

How to translate

If you have an installed gtalX with our make script, in the /usr/share/gtalx/languagefiles directory you will find a file called Hungarian.txt. Copy that file; the name of the new file should be the English name of the language into which you are going to translate gtalX (e.g. French.txt or German.txt). If you start gtalX in an environment that is different from English, gtalX will load the file automatically. If no such file exists, it will print an error message that you can read if you start it from a console. E.g.

language file not found: /usr/bin/../share/gtalx/languagefiles/French.txt

Obvoiusly if you want to translate gtalX into French, you need to create a file called French.txt in the above mentioned directory. Once you have copied Hungarian.txt, edit it, and I think it is easy to figure out what is to be done.

The second line in Hungarian.txt is:
"Translated by"="Fordította: Békés József"

This is a text that will appear in the About dialog; put your own name so that it will be displayed in the About dialog.

If you start gtalX from your console, and a translation is missing, gtalX will complain and will tell you which item is missing in its output to the console. Otherwise it will substitute the English phrase for missing translations in the application.

If you want to translate on an English system, you can modify gtalX's language if you start it and specify the LANG environment variable, like this (if you enter this into the console, gtalX tries to start in German; since there is no German.txt it fails to do so...):
LANG=de_DE gtalx

If you have any questions, just send us an email to the address specified in the Contact us section below. If you have a language file we would be happy to get it; please send it to the same email address and we'll include it in the software.

Contact us

The authors of gtalX are: Erika Bekes, Oliver Leahy and Jozsef Bekes. If you want to contact us, you can send us an email to bjdodo at hotmail dot com.

Licensing

Since this is the first open-source application we have written, we might not have done everything as required. If you find that we are breaking the copyright or any other law in any way, please let us know and we'll do the best to correct the mistakes. We would like to give this code to the open-source community, and we would like to offer this application to all Linux users, but we do not want anyone to be able to sell our code, or make any money from it, so our intention is to place this software under GPL3.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.



Attachments (3)

* gtalx_0.0.5_amd64.deb - on Nov 11, 2009 2:53 PM by Jozsef Bekes (version 1)
7781k Download
* gtalx_0.0.5_i386.deb - on Nov 9, 2009 12:10 PM by Jozsef Bekes (version 1)
6395k Download
* gtalx_screenshot.png - on Dec 11, 2008 2:06 PM by Jozsef Bekes (version 5 / earlier versions)
93k View Download

Link:

http://sites.google.com/site/jozsefbekes/Home/gtalx

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