Posted on October 9, 2009 - by jono
This Is What Awesome Looks Like

This is a screenshot of a conversation I had today with Rick Spencer, leader of the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical. Using the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, we are having a video chat using Empathy, while also sharing Rick’s desktop, also using Empathy, and he was demoing some of the work he been doing on Bughugger, a bug management tool that he wrote using the awesome quickly framework for rapid development of applications on Ubuntu. This is collaboration at its finest, all driven by Free Software and delivered by Ubuntu.
It is getting exciting, folks. Really, really exciting.
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Visit My Website
October 9, 2009
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This does look indeed awesome. Now if there could be some sort of integration or connectivity with Google wave, we might have ourselves the only collaboration tool anyone would need for any platform.
Visit My Website
October 9, 2009
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This looks fantastic. I’m waiting for a few more feature from Empathy and a tiny bit more stability before I make the switch from Pidgin, but overall Empathy is looking to be the smarter choice.
Ubuntu 9.10 is looking to be a great release when it arrives later this month.
Visit My Website
October 9, 2009
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I thought Awesome looked like this: http://awesome.naquadah.org/
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October 10, 2009
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Yes! Ubuntu needs moar tilling! Why isn’t dwm transmogrified into a Compiz plugin? That would be truly awesome!
Visit My Website
October 9, 2009
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nice to see you are using official ubuntu theme /s
can’t you tell Mark how ugly it is. The new humanity icons are nice.
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October 9, 2009
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Please Share this awesomeness with kubuntu users :p
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October 9, 2009
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There’s work ongoing to add Telepathy support to Kopete, and add Telepathy-based desktop sharing to the KDE VNC components (whose names I forget offhand). Of course, it will interoperate with Empathy and Vino/Vinagre on Gnome!
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October 9, 2009
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@bigbrovar if you want awesomeness, you’ll just have to use gnome, won’t you?
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October 9, 2009
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Yeah right. Maybe in a few years they’ll consider that. Until then, KDE may implement it but Kubuntu will compile that option out.
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October 9, 2009
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Jono,
Great job and thanks for the news. Very timely as we’re having “Karmic Koala Night” in Vancouver tonight.
An observation: There’s a lot of (too much) skepticism about (the switch to) Empathy, and the state of voice/video chat in general on Ubuntu. Could you or the developers post some screencasts of this so that we can help spread the good word with some evidence to back it up?
Many thanks in advance.
Cheers, Randall Ubuntu Vancouver Buzz Generator
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October 9, 2009
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Wow, I’m impressed. It seems like the pace of progress is picking up. I think Karmic Koala will be a good release.
Visit My Website
October 9, 2009
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Let’s hope this isn’t collaboration “at its finest” — I think this is great but we have a lot of room for improvement.
I had a conversation with Jorge over Empathy the other day. I can’t wait until audio and video chat becomes a standard part of the free software collaboration repertoire. Seeing and hearing Jorge really inspired me. It truly felt like we were collaborating and not merely communicating.
Ubuntu has a great opportunity to lead in this direction by leveraging voice and video chat to make our community even stronger. I can’t wait to use desktop sharing and audio chat to conduct user testing and QA!
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October 9, 2009
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I got the Beta the other day. I’ve been running it in VMware Fusion on my Mac. So far it seems to be a great release. I remember back when I started using Ubuntu (6.04 I believe) and I used to have to make a lot of changes in order for it to do what I wanted it to do.
It’s amazing how much progress Ubuntu has made over the years. I get excited everytime there is a new release. I look forward to seeing what the future hold for Ubuntu and Linux as a whole.
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October 11, 2009
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Yes, I have tested Empathy as well. Such a great product. There needs to be more WOW factor, that will attract the general public to Ubuntu. Leading the revolution is betting than following it.
Keep up the good work.
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October 13, 2009
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Yay. Almost catching up to what OS X could do 3 or 4 years ago. Keep trying, though.
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November 6, 2009
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That’s not what awesome looks like. awesome looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png
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January 14, 2010
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This is definitely what I have been waiting for. Linux lags way behind Windows in providing AV messaging. I always have to go back into XP to chat with my brother who lives 500 miles away.
The sad thing is that I still have to do it. AV sessions still do not work in Karmic for MS messenger. I am told it will work in Lucid. Maybe it will, but probably not with my web cam (which works OK in windows without any trouble, but took ages to get working in Ubuntu for Skype).
I get the feeling that the Ubuntu developers need to get their heads out of the clouds, come down to earth and concentrate on providing the quality of AV experience enjoyed by Windows users.
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February 10, 2010
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Ubuntu 9.10 empathy 2.28.1.1 Protocol msn I have hard time with empathy and msn protocol. I have installed the patched release telepathy-butterfly_0.5.2-1 p to enable video/audio chat. If I switch on the cam, when empathy is trying to connect, i can see myself, but after a couple of minutes, it stops the connection trying. Thus, I opened empathy by the terminal and during the video connection trying i received the following error:
stream_try_sending_codecs: calling MediaStreamHandler::CodecsUpdated (empathy:4031): tp-fs-DEBUG: stream 1 0xa43d060 (audio) close: close requested by connection manager empathy-Message: Element error: Errore interno nel flusso di dati. — gstbasesrc.c(2378): gst_base_src_loop (): /GstPipeline:pipeline0/EmpathyGstAudioSrc:empathygstaudiosrc0/GstGConfAudioSrc:gconfaudiosrc0/GstBin:bin3/GstAlsaSrc:alsasrc0: streaming task paused, reason not-linked (-1)
(empathy:4031): tp-fs-DEBUG: stream 2 0xa43d0d0 (video) close: close requested by connection manager
Please, can you help me?