Skype or Ekiga on Ubuntu 8.04

Skype or Ekiga
Which is better? Well I tested both and here are my impressions of using each. The first thing you need to do is try it yourself as that will be an important aspect. Here are links to 2 easy tutorials to get you going.

Compare Skype and Ekiga
Skype Tutorial
Ekiga Tutorial

Ekiga
The biggest thing I like about Ekiga was that it was the default and I assumed as a result that it would be the easiest to get going. Well…it wasn’t. The software install with about 12 steps instead of the 3 steps with Skype. That was one thing I didn’t like as it provided more opportunity for error and then trying to find the error was even more complex. However, the biggest problem I had was trying to get my hardware to be consistent. Yep, I would turn it off and find it did not work when I wanted to use it again. I kept getting error messages about my sound system had a conflict. I experimented a lot trying to find the issue, for me it was setting my sound to ALSA not PulseAudio, the standard on Ubuntu 8.04. So my frustration with Ekiga as that while it was the default, it was problematic and while PulseAudio was the default it did not work. I thought this was the LTS version, I must have missed something.

Skype
My biggest complaint about Skype was that the website seemed to indicate that there was not current version for Ubuntu 8.04. That always makes me nervous as I like to keep version matching not having to go back to the Ubuntu 7.10 version. It almost looks on the Skype site that it is not kept up well, again an indication that there business model is not working as well as they liked. However, despite these issues Skype was dead easy to set up and get going. And I had no problems with my hardware acting up.

You can get both to work with a little work. I did notice that a typical problem is a low volume microphone so get the best you can to help in that area.