ADMIN - Explore the new world of system administration! ADMIN is a smart, technical magazine for IT pros on heterogeneous networks. Each issue delivers technical solutions to the real-world problems you face every day. Learn the latest techniques for better:
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Looking for a softphone? We compare five Linux-ready VoIP clients.
If you have read the introduction to VoIP earlier in this issue, you will be familiar with the Ekiga VoIP client, which comes with the Gnome desktop. Several other softphones also inhabit the desktops of Linux users. In this article, I consider the leading candidates in a head-to-head comparison: Ekiga, KPhone SI, Linphone, Skype, and Twinkle. All of these programs share support or Internet telephony and availability at no cost. All of them, apart from the pro- prietary Skype, are GPL’d and support The SIP and RTP protocols (see the VoIP Basics article). Table 1 gives an overview of the test candidates. The table does not include KPhone SI for reasons that will be explained later.
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