SL and voice chat

Can someone please explain to me how to use voice chat with the newest release candidate. I use Ubuntu 7.10, and a logitech headset that hooks into the mic hack of my computer. Can someone walk me through it?

I plugged my mic in, and started the SL client, enabled voice chat, and a white dot appeared over my head. When I tried talking to a friend of mine she didn't appear in the list of voice users, and I couldn't hear her. Do I need to run any other applications? Do I need to do anything special? Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I posted a very similar thread last night then spotted one that may have some promise. Try here: /263/9d/255579/1.html

Cheers,
Pap.

Ok, I tried the guide in the link you tried. I think I made it worse. Now the little white dot isn't above my head. I tried everything in the steps outlined, and I can get everything installed, no error messages, but I get no echo when speaking into the microphone. And I no longer show up in the list of active voice members anymore.

Here. I made this a while ago:

http://www.adamascarter.com/extras/sl_voice_linux.txt

Let me know how it works.

Ok, I have now a weird situation. I had given up on voice because none of the guides here worked for me.

Now suddenly, from yesterday, I "kind of" have voice. Let me explain:

I was at a party with some friends, and they were using voice, so I thought to give it a shot. The last few times I tried, it didn't even showed me on the active users list. This time, I heard my friends clearly, and they could hear me clearly....for exactly 1 minute. then all went back to like it was before, until I unchecked the voice and checked it again. I had voice again for a full minute. It went on like this all night, I have voice for 1 minute, and then I have to disable and then re enable voice to have it for another minute.

Does anyone know what is going on? I am using Kubuntu 7.10, stable 1.19 SL viewer, pulseaudio is installed, alsa is installed, no ESD, and aRts is on. And on the Voice Chat Device settings, input device is set to "ALSA Capture on default" and output device is set to "ALSA software on default"

Yes, I can tell you what the problem is.

Download the text file in my previous post.

Your problem is twofold:
1. You're using arts. Don't. Arts is a train wreck. Shut it down.
2. You're not using ESD. Do. It provides half the network setup you need to run voice.

Here is that link again:

http://www.adamascarter.com/extras/sl_voice_linux.txt

Adamas, I did everything on your guide since the first time you published it. It never worked for me, I always ended up with the white dot over my head, but I could hear nobody, had nobody on the active users list (not even myself), and of course could not talk.
What I don't understand is, how come it is sort of working now (even if it is only for a minute) after I uninstalled ESD, and with aRts on, since all the guides here say to do the opposite?

By the way, nobody has yet explained why the OFFICIAL Linux voice read me that comes with the client fails to ask for aRts to be shut down and ESD to be installed. If I'm a new user, and don't know about this forum, from that read me I can understand that I don't need to do anything special to my sound setup for voice to work.

Reyfer, I don't understand what you are asking/saying. If you are happy with a minute or two of voice using the official LL method, then that's great. I had a slightly different experience with aRts; it would work one session, then not work the next. It took me weeks of testing different configurations and pulling my hair to finally get voice to work stably and reliably.

You don't provide much information I might use to troubleshoot your problem. I think some other people have gotten this to work with Kubuntu, I use OpenSUSE 10.3.

All I can suggest is to try as many different things as you can think of. Check out your system updates and make sure your hardware, especially your audio card, are working properly.

Other things to look for are network connection/configuration and firewall setup.

Adamas, I know your method works, it has worked for lots of friends of mine, just that so far it hasn't for me.
What I am saying is two things, really:
1) I did absolutely nothing new, and it SUDDENLY started working, I am know experimenting with variations of your method to make it last more than a minute

2) I still find it odd and to some extent irresponsible that the official read-me says that all you need is headphones with mic, and ALSA, while WE know some other things (Pulseaudio, ESD, etc...) are needed for Voice to work. A new user, following that read-me, will just get to the conclusion that Voice is IMPOSSIBLE on Linux.

Linux is not a priority for LL else they would have better documentation for it. If you open a support ticket and tell them you're using Linux, they will automagically default to the assumption that you must really be using window$ (this really happened to me!).

Btw, the original how-to I wrote was for using the windows voice executable under Linux. The one I hand out now is for the native Linux voice binary.