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

Note: Remember that as of February 2016, Ring is still in alpha stage. As such, things might break, especially when upgrading.

Ring is currently packaged in the AUR. You can choose between several versions:

Tango-edit-cut.pngThis section is being considered for removal.Tango-edit-cut.png

Reason: Dependencies are usually not documented in the ArchWiki (duplicating the PKGBUILD). (Discuss in Talk:Ring#)

These packages will pull the appropriate dependencies (ring-daemon-gitAUR, libringclient-gitAUR or ring-daemonAUR, libringclientAUR).

Tango-edit-cut.pngThis section is being considered for removal.Tango-edit-cut.png

Reason: In this wiki it is usually assumed that users know that VCS packages are unstable, and that AUR maintainers maintain their packages (by definition). (Discuss in Talk:Ring#)

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

Tango-edit-cut.pngThis section is being considered for removal.Tango-edit-cut.png

Reason: This is true for every package. (Discuss in Talk:Ring#)

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.