Eventhough you can run Skype on Linux system as described in my last post, I think some more flexible and open options worth to be set.

Ekiga is one of them and is available out of the box in Ubuntu.

Open Ekiga:

Go to Tools -> PC-To-Phone:

In the new window, click “Get an Ekiga PC-To-Phone account”

This will pop up a new page in Firefox and from there, you will be able get some credit with diamondcard.us which is the default SIP provider for Ekiga and from which the dev team will gain a little money for each new account created this way.

You will then receive an email from diamondcard.us entitled something like “Diamond Worldwide Communication Service Signup Confirmation”. From that point, if you have paid with PayPal or by credit card, it can take up to 48h before your account will get activated. I’ve been stuggling a lot to get Ekiga to work because of this. In fact, you’ve got your account ID in the message but you have to read somewhere else about this delay. To get your password, you have to login into diamondcard.us/login and use the account id and pin code displayed on the first page to fill the required fields in the Pc-To-Phone account window.

That’s pretty much it now. You can try to call  by composing in the form “sip:1819539XXXX@eugw.ast.diamondcard.us” where 1 is the country code, 819 the regional code and so on…

If it fails because of the delay, you will see “Security Check Failed” in Tools->Calls History: