Ring
Ring is a new peer-to-peer communication solution, offering voice, video and chat in a decentralised and secure way. It is being developed by Savoir-faire Linux, a Canadian company specialising in Free Software.
The ancestor of Ring is SFLphone, a portable SIP/AIX software phone, also developed by Savoir-faire Linux. Ring retains most of the audio and SIP capabilities of SFLphone, while adding a Bittorrent-like DHT to completely avoid dependency on servers, and offering video and chat communication.
Additionally, Ring has a clean separation between daemon and user interface, and thus several interoperable clients are provided: Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, Android.
Installation
Ring is currently packaged in the AUR. You can choose between several versions:
- Gnome client, weekly/monthly snapshot: ring-gnomeAUR
- Gnome client, latest git version: ring-gnome-gitAUR
- KDE client, latest git version: ring-kde-gitAUR
These packages will pull the appropriate dependencies (ring-daemon-gitAUR, libringclient-gitAUR or ring-daemonAUR, libringclientAUR).
Whether you want to use the -git packages or the "stable" snapshots is up to you. ring-gnomeAUR, ring-daemonAUR and libringclientAUR are updated weekly to monthly, and the maintainer checks that everything works fine before uploading the new version to the AUR. -git packages, on the other hand, may offer new features, but they may also be broken.
Usage
You just have to use the launcher provided by your desktop environment, or run the ring
command as user:
$ ring
It will detect which client is installed (Gnome or KDE) and run it. The daemon is launched automatically by the clients.
Upgrading
Important note: to upgrade, please make sure that you upgrade all dependencies from the AUR at the same time! Otherwise, things will certainly break (API/ABI change).
That is, to upgrade ring-gnome-git or ring-kde-git, also upgrade libringclient-git, ring-daemon-git, and opendht-git.