Get to Know GnomeMeeting

JigSaw writes "OSNews has a nice review/introduction to GnomeMeeting discussing its setup, usage and features. Some screenshots are included."

Comments

Decent code, a couple of duplicate chunks...

[tcopeland]

...as reported by CPD.

Here's the report.

Re:and the most important feature...

[mccalli]

At least the Windows users on the other end don't have to download any additional program, they can just continue to use what they did before...

Yes, and this I find to be iChat AV's big weakness. If I can't connect to the vast majority of computer users, I can't really make use of it.

Ideally, I'd like to see iChat AV start working with NetMeeting and also Messenger. It's an unavoidable fact of computing life that most of the people you'll be dealing with are going to be running Windows on the client.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:and the most important feature...

[moquist]

Another important point from their FAQ is

2.8. Does it support the T.120 protocol?

No, T.120 support is not implemented in GnomeMeeting yet. We prefer to focus on videoconferencing features and protocols than to add support for T.120. Moreover, most T.120 features like desktop sharing, or file transferts can be easily achieved using other dedicated tools.

Though it is the "official network meeting software" where I work, nobody I know uses Netmeeting for anything other than sharing their applications and/or desktops while everyone is in a conference call. (I think this is silly - sometimes we even use separate videoconferencing as well.)

Unfortunately, this one thing that I need Gnomemeeting to do is the one thing that it doesn't do. Lately I've been using rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/) to connect to our W2K Terminal Servers, and I run Netmeeting from there. Works like as much of a charm as possible, given that I'm forced to use MS software...

Where's the Windows port?

[hungryfrog]

I traded a few e-mails last year with Damien (the lead developer). He said a Windows port was being actively worked on and was just a few weeks/months off. Anyone heard anything on this? I was hoping to use GnomeMeeting in our office, where there's no chance of switching to Linux desktops anytime soon.

Doesn't work with ichat AV?

[acomj]

Noticed that it doesn't work with macos X ichat. I noticed that during his introduction S jobs indicated ichat was built using opensource, so my question is how hard would it be to get it to work with ichat?

Re:Fear

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you better be look at the screenshot again.

Eugenia keep up the good work, dont let this jerks drove you from what really matters. Stuff for nerds of course :D

best feature of gnomemeeting

[molo]

The best feature of gnomemeeting is that it supports 1394 AV/C cameras (aka DV camcorders). That means you can plug in you standard firewire camcorder and use that as your webcam! This requires a recent (and maybe customized) build, but it works quite well.

-molo

Did anyone read the screenshots?

[TheTranceFan]

Enlarge the screenshots. Look at the chat panes. Basically all they're chatting about is how to get the software to work. Talk about threadjacking! It's worse -- meetingjacking.

If your meeting software transforms your meeting into a multipoint tech support video conference, the software is not ready for primetime.

The software needs to be invisible - it can't impede the act of having the meeeting in any way. Currently no solution, including NetMeeting, truly achieves this goal.

Why _GNOME_ Meeting?

[RAMMS EIN]

I tried to get GNOMEMeeting a couple of years ago. Back then, my harddisk space was limited and I used Slackware. This means that I got to think twice before installing any software, because of the space constraints, and because of the effort in configuring, compiling and installing a package and every single dependency.

I had been able to get by without GNOME and KDE; most apps I used being GTK+ apps that could be compiled with or without GNOME. Not GNOMEMeeting. However, I figured that I could install the GNOME libraries and get not only GNOMEMeeting, but also some mighty cool features in my other apps...after all, there had to be a reason why people use the GNOME libraries, right?

Well, for some reason I don't remember I couldn't or wouldn't install GNOME from packages. So of I went to download, configure, compile and install every single component. Eventually I had a working GNOME install.

And then I got stuck...it turned out I also needed some libraries to support H.323, but couldn't get them compiled due to lack of virtual memory - I had 384 MB, which is exactly what the manual said I would need, but apparently was just not enough. Eventually I managed to compile the framework in debug mode - why this takes _less_ memory I still fail to see.

Compiling GNOMEMeeting was complicated by lots of errors apparently caused by the version of OpenH323 I had installed not being quite what GNOMEMeeting expected. Finally I managed to get everything installed and working...and then it turned out that GNOMEMeeting didn't work nearly as well as I had expected it to. In many cases, it just wouldn't connect. Judging from the article, not much has changed in that respect, although I am pleased to see that GM works with NAT now.

Now you may see the above as me blaming GM for Slackware lacking a good packaging system (mostly suffering from the lack of packages made for it), and that is indeed one source of the hardships I encountered. But I am asking you, and I seriously wonder, why does GM need GNOME? The way I see it, all it has to do is grab video and audio, encode it, and send it over the network, and play the video and audio it receives over the network. To my knowledge, none of these things require GNOME, nor are they easier to implement using GNOME. Am I wrong?