Gilles Gravier's Weblog

Building aMSN with audio and video on OpenSolaris - piece of cake!

I got tired of not being able to use webcam and audio with my friends on OpenSolaris... so I decided to tackle the problem. Blastwave's version of aMSN was very old... so there was no other option... get it myself and build it.

Turned out to be trivial...

Get the sources from : http://www.amsn-project.net/  and then ./configure, then gmake, then pfexec gmake install (my OpenSolaris box has already GCC and the GNU compiler suite installed). Simpler for all GNU / Linux source codes available out there.

First thing that happens when you run it is that it tells you it wants TLS to log in... so you install the SUNWtcltls package form the OpenSolaris repository with Package Manager... and in the advance preferences tab, specify that TLS is at : /usr/lib/tcl8.4/tls1.6 ... and voila... you can log in.

Of course, next thing is that there is no audio... so you figure out it wants Snack, the audio library for TCL... well, that too is available from the OpenSolaris repository through Package Manager. Just install SUNWsnack and restart aMSN. Then you can configure audio (preferences -> advanced) to use Snack...

For the webcam, it's even simpler. OpenSolaris includes USB-VC drivers for Video4Linux2, so plug in a high-end USB-VC webcam and aMSN directly supports it! Just go to the preferences->others menu in aMSN and edit the audio and video settings!

I love it when things just work!

Posted at 11:50PM Apr 26, 2009 by gravax in Opensource  |  Comments[0]