The short: They almost all suck. Hardware support is awful, and the field is crowded with a hundred different API that all do the same thing, poorly (story of FOSS, I think).
The long: I tried a number of video conferencing tools, and most of them were miserable failures. Among those I tried were Ekiga (formerly gnomemeeting), Kphone (which relies on vic), minisip and Mercury Messenger, and anything Flash.
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Ekiga ultimately worked for me. In Gentoo, it annoyingly relies on LDAP, which I can’t imagine being an actual requirement in the software. In fact, I can’t even find an option to use LDAP in the program itself. Anyway, the first couple of times I tried to install it, I left out the all-important v4l (video for linux) flag, which is naturally important for a webcam that uses v4l. Eventually, I got that working, and I actually have video. Just like the Dilbert comic, I don’t have anyone to call (Karolina wasn’t around by the time I got this working). It’s annoying that it doesn’t store the camera brightness and contrast settings.
Like most things in Gentoo, it ultimately Just Works: you can futz around with the USe flags and config files, but in the end it’s the defaults that are what work. So, I can’t really offer any insight into making this work.
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Kphone also looked promising, but relied on the program vic, which is, shall we say, weird. They provided binary packages, but not for Intel architecture (are they for real?). Then I couldn’t make the source compile, so I just dropped it. I actually can’t remember the details, since I was frustrated at this point. In the course of writing this, though, I noticed their News page only has events from 1995, which may be a problem.
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Minisip was perhaps the most ridiculous. It’s always a problem when you can only use programs from the main development branch. I tried to find the stable branch in their code repository, but for some reason it’s been deleted. I’m not a pro with the subversion tool, so I couldn’t find when this happened (so I could get the most recent stable release), but in my short experience I haven’t known subversion to ever forget things in that way. It was also trouble that their lists had only three emails per month for the past six months, and that the development list only had emails of spam or commit records (automatically generated). I dropped this one pretty fast.
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I saved the best for last. Mercury Messenger was just an outright catastrophe. Their developers are a bunch of hacker types (I mean the teenager kind) that threatened to ban anyone who posted their (freely available) code online. What’s worse, is that it relies on Java Media Framework (JMF), which, like all Java programs, looks like absolute crap, and has no configuration options. The issue is probably that the development of JMF stopped in 2002, so I’m not it supports video for linux, or at least modern API for v4l.
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The Flash player did not work. I have no idea how one would approach fixing that.
