# 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 May 2016, Ring is still in beta stage. As such, things might break, especially when upgrading.

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

- Gnome client, weekly/monthly snapshot: ring-gnomeAUR
- KDE client, stable version: ring-kdeAUR
- Gnome client, latest git version: ring-gnome-gitAUR
- KDE client, latest git version: ring-kde-gitAUR

## Usage

You can use the desktop launcher provided by your desktop environment, or run the `ring.cx` command as user:

    $ ring.cx

It will detect which client is installed (Gnome or KDE) and run it. The daemon is launched automatically by the clients.

## Upgrading

This section is being considered for removal.

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.

Category:

- Telephony and voice

Hidden category:

- Sections flagged with Template:Remove