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:

Main window

Go to Tools -> PC-To-Phone:

Menu

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

PC-To-Phone

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:

Security Check Failed