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
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
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.