On GNOME, Telepathy is used by the Empathy IM client. Empathy has a user interface based on Gossip. Empathy supports various protocols like XMPP, Google Talk, MSN, IRC, SIP, etc. Furthermore, Empathy can also use libpurple via Telepathy-haze and hence support all the protocols that Pidgin does.
Empathy was included as a part of GNOME from version 2.24. Hence it has been (or is about to be) adopted by some of the major distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora as their default IM client. Its inclusion in these distributions has meant replacing Pidgin, which has caused some controversy, as some people feel it is not mature enough. Though Empathy does require a little more polish, it brings with it a huge number of features that more than make up
Figure 2: Conversation window with Adium chat themes Figure 1: The contact list in Empathy
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fix your parents’ computer remotely or want to view files on your home PC from your office.
As Empathy is a part of GNOME, it integrates well with other GNOME applications. For instance, it interacts with NetworkManager to know if a connection is available or not, and if not then it doesn’t try to keep on reconnecting. When somebody calls you, it pauses the music in Rhythmbox and then the music resumes once the call ends. It can set your status message to show the music you’re currently playing in Rhythmbox, as well.
While all this is certainly very cool and exciting, the best feature that Telepathy brings to the table is something known as tubes. Essentially, what this does is to allow any application to take advantage of the Telepathy framework to add collaboration features with maximum ease. The kind of power and
usefulness this feature adds to the applications is tremendous.
We already saw how this will enable desktop sharing using Vino and Vinagre. There are many more applications for this—for instance, we can collaboratively work on a document in AbiWord using the AbiCollab plug-in. We can share currently playing music and other music files, which is soon going to be possible in Banshee (and also Rhythmbox) as a result of a GSOC project. We can also play games with our contacts, a feature that is being worked upon for GNOME Sudoku.
GNOME isn’t the only desktop looking to use Telepathy; work is going on so that our KDE brethren can also enjoy this wonderful tool. Kopete is looking to modify itself to be able to use Telepathy’s QT port. As Telepathy is a highly modular and portable framework, it is used in many other platforms apart from the Linux desktop. In fact, Telepathy was first commercially deployed on the Nokia 770 to handle its IM and communication needs. Since then, it has been used in many other Nokia devices like Nokia 800, 810 and the
By: Praveen Thirukonda The author is a third year computer engineering student. He likes playing badminton when not messing around on his computer.
recently released Nokia N900, as it is part of the Maemo platform. Even Intel uses Telepathy for its Moblin platform. The Sugar desktop, which was formerly used by the OLPC project, has also used the Telepathy framework.
Moreover...
Until now, both Telepathy and Empathy have mainly been worked upon to get the basic features in order so that many cool features can be added in the future. Having audio/ video chat and file transfer support on all major protocols would really be great. Apart from this, the addition of support for meta contacts using the People or Soylent project is also planned. This will allow us to merge multiple contacts belonging to the same person, on different protocols. Then our contacts list will truly become a friends list.
Better integration with the desktop is being worked upon for Empathy, especially for the upcoming GNOME 3 release. The GNOME Shell is being designed while keeping Empathy in mind. Zeitgest, the second major application to feature in GNOME 3, will also feature integration with Telepathy to enable easier access to chat history.
To enable audio/video conferences with several people at once, the MUJI (Multi User Jingle) project has been started. This will make it possible to have conferences over an open protocol using open codecs out-of-the-box, from your favourite distribution. All this is so that there is no longer any need for proprietary applications, which seem to be out of place on a free desktop anyway.
I guess with Telepathy, we might have finally solved the communications part of the ‘desktop Linux’ problem.
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school that wins the inter-country contest. What’s more, there are also netbooks for the winners, awarded by IOTA (Institute for Open Technology and Application).
The complete evaluation process of the Olympiad has been visually outlined in the flowchart.
T
he ODF Olympiad (www.odfolympiad.org)was launched in 2006 as a global school-level competition. It started off, on the advice of India’s earlier President, Shri A P J Abdul Kalam, with the goal of increasing awareness about open source software in schools. The 2008 edition of the ODF Olympiad witnessed participation from over 116 countries. The competition aims to showcase the ease of using cutting-edge ODF compliant software such as OpenOffice. org and to bring students and teachers closer to adopting free and open source software.
For the 2009 edition of the Olympiad, students of all the participating institutes are required to submit a 21-slide presentation via e-mail, in an Open Document Format (ODF), based on specified topics. And the submissions will be evaluated by an eminent jury, on the basis of pre-determined parameters. The contest will help the government and the schools in faster adoption of the ODF, which would further help in narrowing the digital divide.