On 3/27/07, Siddhesh Poyarekar siddhesh.poyarekar@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/27/07, Chetan S cshring@gmail.com wrote:
FOSS alternatives to what ? Yahoo client ? You'll play a catch up with them for the rest of your life. They change a bit / encryption scheme and your clients will barf on you.
Well yahoo doesn't change its protocol everyday. Even if it does, it doesn't do it in a manner that older clients will barf on your because they have to take care of users with older clients. I'm using ayttm with the older version of libyahoo2. While the protocol is different and some (very few actually) features are misplaced, it certainly doesn't barf. And mind you that before a couple of months, ayttm wasn't updated for over 2-3 years. Hence, what you're saying is simply FUD.
:D i wish. Ayttm looks butt ugly until the gtk2 port will be out. And again from libyahoo2 site - libyahoo2 does not yet have support for Voice messages, nor for IMvironments.
Useless as they are, they are used by quite a few people.
From Gaim ( most popular alternative ? ) -
While in Web Messenger mode, several things work differently or not at all. Adding, moving, and removing buddies doesn't work, and the only available statuses are "Available" and "Invisible". In addition, the Yahoo! server seems to ignore all Yahoo! Chat related packets. For this reason, we use the YCHT protocol to join Yahoo! Chat rooms while connected using the Web Messenger method.
Something or the other will always not be supported.
Coming back to the point of VOIP ( which is the one that matters most ) unless the OSS solution does not allow user to make a call from PC to Phone or use webcam for a decent payment ( for the infrastructure ) it is esentially useless to the aam janta.
I don't understand why it matters most. Out of 100 visitors to a cyber cafe not more than 10-15 would want to do voice chat.
Again. 10-15 would be a hit. I am referring to no-loss scenario. Why should the cyber cafe owners face a loss for upholding Free ideology ? Also why should he get a new webcam to get it to work with linux ?
Simply stated - Linux ke liye ye naya kharido, woh naya kharido ... why ?
Talk of webcams and video editing and things like that and most seasoned Linux professionals get the creeps.
Setting up webcams is the work of an admin and not the cafe user. That too, I assume, is not very difficult as I haven't too many gripes about non-working webcams. And why do seasoned Linux professionals get creeps when you talk of video editing?
I am not making any off the cuff assumptions here. Video capture is mostly a pain because the drivers are missing. And the video composition chain is even more missing. Cinerrela and kino exist but again one problem - integration with video cam ?
Fast , Free and works for my hardware is the only criteria for the end-users to use it.
We're talking about cafes and not end users, right?
sigh. who visits cafes ?
While I endorse OSS on every front, being anal to workarounds does not work anywhere beyond techies domain.
Opposing wine as a solution is not being anal; I'm opposing the 'wash your hands off it quickly with wine' solution.
More like keep your hands clean of windows till you work on the "minor" tweaks.
Most needs are fulfilled by FOSS, they only need minor tweaking here and there. Familiarity here should not be an issue since if all/most cyber cafes are going to implement this solution then there is not real competitor. If licensing is mandatory then the windows based cafes will become expensive, making the FOSS based cafes more desirable.
Till the "minor" is not quantified and it does not serve a solution for a definite time frame.
And games are again a question, no ?
@Rony - And to the question of using wine here's from the wine faq -
3.8. Do I need to have a DOS partition on my system to use Wine?
You do not need a licensed and installed copy of DOS or MS Windows to install, configure or run Wine. However, Wine has to be able to 'see' an MS Windows binary (i.e. application) if it is to run it.
It still needs the proprietary apps to run them; and in some cases it is illegal to run them from wine (IE).
Why you would need to run IE under wine ? Most apps ( non-microsoft ) do not have clause to run only from Windows.
And all the while I am only proposing to run the applications which have an immediate need and do not have complete alternatives covering most used and major features.
regards, C