Good news for Google Talk users on Linux
Yesterday I asked my wife to chat with her mother using my new Ubuntu 8.10 and she happily accepted it. She quickly picked up pidgin and started chatting. But then she asked me, ” I want to speak to my mother, how can I go about?”. I told her that with pidgin you can only do text chat and voice chat facilities are not supported in pidgin. When she asked me, “Why don’t you just install Google Talk?”, I replied her, “Google Talk is not yet available for Linux”. She just went to her Windows XP notebook. Looks like I missed a major oppurtunity to convert my wife to Ubuntu.
I too love Google Talk and I miss it whenever I use Ubuntu. Most of my friends have google talk account but I was able to only chat with them by sending text messages from either Pidgin or Gmail. Though many Google products like Google Earth, Picasa are now available in Linux, Google Talk is not yet there and many Linux users like me need it very badly.
So I was looking around for some solution and I came to know about a great product called “Empathy“. I quickly opened my Synaptic Package Manager and searched for “empathy”. Luckily the required packages were available in my Synaptic Package Manager and I selected the package “empathy” and marked it for installation. The other required packages were automatically selected and the download/installation went smoothly as it use to be in Ubuntu.
Post installation, Empathy was found under “Applications->Internet->Empathy Instant Messenger” in my machine. The interface looks somewhat similar to Pidgin and I was able to quickly add a Google Talk account.
Then when you enable the added account and sign in into it, all your contacts are displayed in the same way Pidgin does. But when you right click an contact, Empathy provides option to “Call” the contact as well and it worked smoothly for me. And Empathy can sit quietly in the system tray like Pidgin. Wow. I felt as if I was using Google Talk on Windows. Great effort Empathy team and thank you very much for bringing this wonderful product to the Linux world.
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I’ve install Empathy however it’s asking for installing a back end protocol to enable adding accounts
any suggestions?
Empathy, like pidgin uses jabber/xmpp protocols. I suppose that might be missing in your case. Do you have pidgin in your system? Check whether you have the packages “telepathy-gabble”, “telepathy-salut”.
I want to know whether empathy works with proxy!! we have a ntlm proxy with authentication using username password ……….Last time i tried, it ddnt work
finally! voice in ubuntu
Will “Empathy” also support file transfer like the way GTalk does?
Sounds great. now if only I could get a microphone and video camera working I’d be able to use this!
ALSA!
OSS!
ESD!
Oy Veh!
Testing a microphone crashed the Sound Preferences program on my Ubuntu 8.10 Dell Precision M90
i have installed empathy. however, it is not showing any of my gmail contacts. what to do??
Thanks
I wish there was support for FTP as well. I wonder if it is really that complicated, Im guessing just some calls to sftp by the app. Makes a good summer of code project (and you get paid).
@ Gireesh
i asked the empathy devs the same question in their irc and was told not all protocols for empathy supports proxy. am nor sure google works with proxy. but yahoo certainly doesnt.
Try Gizmo5 it works great for me.
vishwa, this will probably be taken as an insult but did you make sure your status was set to Available, Busy, Away or Hidden?
Did u try on 64 bit ubuntu? Last time when I tried with 8.04 64 bit I could not make empathy work.
user@dell~> uname -m
x86_64
user@dell~> lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.10
Release: 8.10
Codename: intrepid
thanks a lot. I did not know about this and works perfectly on my Dell Vostro 1400.
I was close to installing empathy, when I saw that it was going to be 27MB+. That’s a lot of storage space for one small app, especially on my small netbook. I think I’ll look elsewhere.
for those whom had problem with proxy.. i recommend using proxychains.. it might work though..
good luck
Network Error Occured during google talk and msn on Empathy How can solve this problem please give me an idea please any one????????????????
Good, it helped me..!!
Some how voice is not working for me, pidgin is working cool and even skype is working
I am using Ubuntu 8.10
It works for a few second, the other person using windows can hear me, but I cant hear them. And eventually the system crashed.
Did you fail to use “gtalk in ubuntu” …Now you can chat and talk to your gmail buddies in ubuntu….. See this post for chatting and talking to your gmail friends….http://linuxandmicrocontrollertips.blogspot.com/2009/06/gtalx-gtalk-google-talk-in-ubuntu.html
Did you fail to use “gtalk in ubuntu” …Now you can chat and talk to your gmail buddies in ubuntu….. See this post for chatting and talking to your gmail friends….http://linuxandmicrocontrollertips.blogspot.com/2009/06/gtalx-gtalk-google-talk-in-ubuntu.html
Thanks Man!!
I am installing it right away!!
Hi viewers ..in advance of ubuntu latest version 9.10 should already installed the Empathy in default …so try to use ubuntu latest versions….
Install sudo apt-get install telepathy-gabble
n enjoy empathy
Same here. Work for a few seconds.