H323 analysis

Client possibilities

For some possible H323 (and SIP) VoIP clients you can check this list The only two that support both H323 and linux are:

• Ekiga (see ekiga section)
• SJPhone (not explored by us yet)

Another option is the commandline ohphone. No graphical interface.

Ekiga

If it were to work the interface is supposed to look like this To be downloaded from the ekiga page. Unfortunately the packages OPAL and PWLIB libraries have to be installed first. This is a tedious and time comsuming process (lots of compiling needed). When we were finally done with this we tried to configure ekiga but we got the error message: Package gnome-doc-utils was not found in the pkg-config search path. We gave up since no system manager was available at this moment and decided to go on exploring the SJPhone option first.

Gnomemeeting

Today (1-31) the system manager installed all the necessary packages. But there is a problem for Ekiga when locating the audio-plugins; failing this stops the program execution. Compilation from the sources has been tried as well; unfortunately, after compiling and installing several libraries, the process got stuck on pwlib, where Ekiga requires version 1.10.3 but Debian provides only 1.10.0. Another installed H323 client is the predecessor of Ekiga, Gnomemeeting. This is already installed on the system and seems to work. So far we don't know if this is working; the application starts and everything seems ok, sound support as well. So far no H323 extension is plugged in into TrixBox; this is the next step to support H323 communication.

SJPhone

Very straightforward download from SJ Labs (VoIP software). You get the following interface.

Note: At least the Windows version of SJ-phone is still using SIP, even when this is disabled in the configuration. When using 2 instances of SJphone, to call eachother, the connection is true H323.

H323 and TrixBox

We tried to look up some information on H323 and TrixBox. From the information on the web it seems that this is a tricky topic. Many questions, few answers. People seem to have trouble with it. I haven't been through all the correspondence on the TrixBox forum but it seems that most people have a hard time even setting up a connection (lots of configuring) and when they do succeed the connection dies after 15-30 seconds. We will look into this a bit more tomorrow.

H323-related links

• H.323 for Asterisk - Existing implementations.
• H.323 topics - Various topics on Trixbox-forum.
  • here is the working configuration & tips for oh323 - a topic.
• More H.323 links on the Links-page.
• Configuration Sjphone