I'm very enthusiastic about Empathy taking over for Pidgin in Karmic. I also think it would be great if we could collect all live communication channels in one client, also making Ekiga redundant.
Testing Karmic Koala Alfa 3, I see that Ekiga has been removed from the default desktop and that Empathy doesn't depend on telepathy-sofiasip, meaning that Empathy doesn't support SIP out of the box at all. I installed it and SIP was added as an account type in Empathy. However, I'm not in any way able to connect to my SIP-PSTN provider, which is quite easy with Ekiga. This means I'm going to have to use Ekiga for the time being in any case. Empathy also doesn't have a GUI for entering normal phone numbers and dialing like Ekiga does. I think this would also have to be present for Empathy to replace Ekiga. Having an applet for that and for receiving calls, using Telepathy, would be great. I understand the one-app-per-task philosophy, but I think it's too early to remove Ekiga from the default install. I think we should have both Empathy and Ekiga in this cycle. Hopefully, enough progress has been made for LTS+1 to let Telepathy/Empathy take over. If the assumption is, like the wiki suggests, that people doesn't use VoIP as a replacement for normal phone calls, that assumption is just wrong and we should have a good tool for users like me. :) Best regards, Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop