Wine will install and run the ventrilo VOIP client very well. To get this working, follow these steps:
apt-get install wine wine-dev msttcorefonts
download ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe
run “wincfg” to prepare things
run “wine ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe”
(go through the install, using all the defaults)
Now, everything works with one quirk.
Push to talk works only when the ventrilo window “has focus”
This is somewhat understandable, but annoying, in that you have
to focus the ventrilo window before you can talk.
The other option is to use voice-detection, but that takes up a bit more cpu-time, and you may accidentally broadcast something you don’t want to.
A program that listens for keypreses and directs them to the ventrilo window fixes this problem:
http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/
http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/ventriloctrl-0.3.tar.gz
To compile it, you’ll need xorg headers:
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
I’m really close to finishing up a native Ventrilo client for Linux. You can follow our progress at http://www.mangler.org/. And of course it doesn’t need focus for push-to-talk either. 🙂
FYI, we’ve released 1.0rc1 of Mangler, which allows you to connect to Ventrilo servers with a native linux client. Try it out if you can and let us know if you have any problems.
Hi Eric,
I downloaded a version of mangler (from the SVN) in October (the “ABOUT” button said it was 1.0rc1). It connected to the server and I could hear everybody just fine.
However, they complained that my voice was “scratchy” and didn’t sound good. (I assume because the default codec was set to a lower bitrate than ventrilo’s default, or using a different codec altogether.)
So, I went back to my wine version of vent and my friends said that I sounded better on it.
Jay
Your server codec is fine. Depending on the version you had and your version of PulseAudio, it could have been triggering an audio latency bug. I didn’t know they changed the default latency because no one filed a bug report and told me :(. I only found out about it when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10.
Anyway.. all of that is fixed. There have been a TON of changes since I last posted on your blog:
http://www.mangler.org/news/
I tried the new SVN version of Mangler and it worked great, thanks! I love having a VENT client that’s native to linux.
Jay