(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Well now, Google has just released a linux version of Google Talk VideoChat. If you have a Google email account you can make a phone call to any phone in the US through your browser using a plugin. A deb file (google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb) was provided.

If you try to install the deb in Puppy, it crashes every browser.

After finding a missing lib and making some link changes, I've gotten it to work in Lupu-510 with Firefox 3.5.7 (not tested on any other releases).

Attached below is a pet file.
http://cid-a3cf84e23b41f496.office.live ... 41F496!136

I do not have a webcam, so the video part wasn't tested.

If anyone has a webcam, it would be great if they could test it with this pet and report back.

It's Free speech at work......
s

Video and regular chat working real good with Firefox 3.66 and Lupu 5.1.Good work!. Thanks

elcurita ,

Great to hear that it's working on your system.

I've read mixed comments in other forums about it's quality.
Did you find the quality of audio and video as good as anything else you've experienced?

Cheers,
s

Would this pet be backward compatible to 5.01 with Firefox 3.6.3? Linux kernel 2.6.33.2 (i686)

If not, I wanted to ask first before crashing stuff.

thanx, ~ Dave

bowwow wrote:Would this pet be backward compatible to 5.01 with Firefox 3.6.3? Linux kernel 2.6.33.2 (i686)

If not, I wanted to ask first before crashing stuff.

thanx, ~ Dave

Dave,

It should be ok.

To be safe, start Puppy with pfix=ram (no save file) and then install the pet to see If it crashes.

Let me know what you think of the video/audio quality.

Thanks,
s

@seaside:
I did quite a few tests with my customers (I managed a small web retailer store) and we found that the best video chat with the best sound is Yahoo Messenger. However, Google chat is most suitable for us because of the "Documents" application and the clean workspace that provides without flash advertising.So.for business Google Chat for personal use Yahoo Chat (in our opinion and circumstance) Let me thank you again for your efforts in providing this plug in.

Thank you SOOOOOooooooo much for this. ♥♥♥♥♥♥

Can anyone tell me if this will run on Puppy 4.2? I'm running Pupeee on my Eeepc. I'd really like to not repeat "The Great Firefox Crash of 2010" (what I'm calling what happened when I attempted to install the .deb) again. So please, warn me if it is going to crash.

♥,
J

Theinfamousj,

Here's how to try out new programs without risking another Great Crash. Boot Pupeee from a live CD with the "puppy pfix=ram" boot option, so it doesn't access your save file, then install the program you want to try and give it a workout. If everything seems ok, you can shut down, boot the usual way and install the program.

This doesn't completely guarantee that the new program won't conflict with another program you've installed. I run Puppy from a multisession CD or DVD. If I install a program which causes problems, I simply don't save that session when I shut down.

Sad news to all, this crashes Firefox on Puppy 4.2.



-J-

OK I tried this with Lucid Puppy 5.1.1 & SeaMonkey 2.0.8 and seemed to not work right at first except for stopping the crashes upon loading browser that happens with the regular .DEB from Google. I had only tested it by going to Gmail -> Settings -> Chat -> Verify Settings (which never has worked yet). So after realizing this .PET includes the initial release, 1.4.1.0, I installed the latest .DEB package with 1.5.1.0 on top of it. Then after the same results I tried making an actual test call & it sounded fine but the microphone wasn't picking up. Then I opened the tray icon retrovol and checked off Mic & Line & turned up the volume for those & tried again & was working OK now. Later I'll check on getting the sound levels to balance out & try the video chat too, but just thought I'd share what I've found and thanks for sharing the .PET package with us.

I attempted to install the PET package on Puppy 5.11. The installation attempt ended with: "Error, package googletalk-ff.pet failed to install".

Anyone got this error?
What did you do about it?

Thanks,
- Ilan -

ilan,

It might have installed. You can check this by typing in "about:plugins" on the Firefox url address line. See if the Google Talk plugin is listed.

If it isn't there, you might have a bad download and perhaps you could retry downloading.

Cheers,
s

Thank you Seaside.

That advice was right-on. The plugin did not show up in "about:plugins" (Firefox).

I went back to the download page. This time I downloaded the full package.
Apparently I was not supposed to download just the "ff" segment (as I previously assumed I was supposed to). There are actually 4 download packages (the full one, on the left, and 3 separate download segments, on the right), in the google-chrome browser page, I assumed that the "ff" package was for me. That assumption was obviously wrong.

This time I downloaded the full package (on the left side) and the installation went flawlessly. I went to the firefox "about:plugins", and saw the google-talk plugin on the list.

I then made some phone calls. Worked great.

My next step will be to test the video conferencing. I don't know anyone that uses google-talk for video conferencing at the moment. I use Skype mostly, but many people seem to use the Yahoo Messenger video conferencing application (not available on Linux, BTW).

Thanks again,
- Ilan -

Am I missing something?

I don't see a link to the download anywhere in this thread.

How bizarre...

The first message in this thread, from Seaside, is blank. But, if I hit the "Quote" button on that post I can read the message.

The googletalk-ff.pet file is posted at http://cid-a3cf84e23b41f496.office.live ... alk-ff.pet.

Good news. Installed the pet, and I can make calls from Gmail in Firefox.

Is there any way to tweak this pet to work in Opera also?

Magruder wrote:Good news. Installed the pet, and I can make calls from Gmail in Firefox.

Is there any way to tweak this pet to work in Opera also?

Magruder,

Great it's working - I have no idea what happened to the first post- strange indeed and thanks for reposting the URL for the pet.

I don't use Opera, but I downloaded and installed it. Then installed the Googletalk-ff.pet and added the following code which links the Opera plugin section.
You can highlight the code and paste into a terminal to run the links.

Opera did not crash and the googletalk plugin appeared in the Opera URL line under "about:plugins"

I didn't actually test a call, but it should work.

Cheers,
s

Seaside,

Thank you. I created the symlinks by copying your code into rxvt.

(This is a good place to repeat how you paste something into rxvt: control-v doesn't work. Use shift-insert instead.)

About:plugins does show that the GoogleTalk plugin is installed. But... it doesn't work. When you click 'Call phone' in Gmail, the popup still says 'please install plugin'.

I went to the folder that the symlinks point to and saw that there's another item, called GoogleTalkPlugin. I made a symlink for that also. Closed and restarted Opera, but that made no difference.

Rebooted, because I couldn't think of anything else to try. Still no difference.

So I started Firefox, and called my mom. She doesn't know anything about this stuff but she's always glad to hear from me.

If you have any ideas, let me know. In the meantime, it works just fine in Firefox.

Magruder,

I thought the hard part was getting the Opera browser to install the plugin.

It seems Google does some checking and isn't just looking for a Firefox or other officially supported browser installation.

My only other thought is to nose around the Ubuntu or Google-talk forums to see if anyone has found a way to use the Google-talk plugin with Opera on linux.

Cheers,
s

Flash wrote:Theinfamousj,
Here's how to try out new programs without risking another Great Crash.

An alternative would be to use a bootable usb. I simply copy the working save to one with test is the name and use the test version. If the test version works....it becomes the working save file.

Takes a bit more time...but prevents the Great Crash.

Thom