GNU Talk

News

GNU/Talk is a complete talk system which is a plug-in replacement of existing talk systems. It includes a client, daemon, and some simple utility programs.

Both the client and daemon support talk protocols 0, and 1. Together they define an extension to ntalk which can be considered ntalk2. This new protocol permits the concept of a "reply" and also call forwarding on NFS distributed environments. You can even use the extension to specify what kind of talk client you are using.

The client does what you would expect, plus a few extra things including multiple connections, data transfer, simple text filters, shared applications, and auto-answer. You can use the client with different front ends, including emacs, curses, ncurses, Xt/Athena, Xt/Lesstif/Motif, and GTK/GNOME. Additional front ends are fairly straight forward to create. The emacs interface supports almost 20 multi-user games.

The daemon also does what one would expect, plus has the ability to collect talk 0, 1, & 2 requests into the same database. This means you can use GNU/talk and it's daemon to connect to any other machine using any old fashioned client regardless of it's protocol, a previously unatainable goal. The daemon also does MRU tty announcing, announce-redirection, blacklisting, and tty-bomb filtering.

Utilities include an X app that will let you launch gtalk, and will "ring" you when there is an announcement, (with audio if you like), and a shared X app that lets you draw pictures with someone.

GNU/Talk is currently at revision 0.99.x with aspirations of 1.0 after a sufficient testing period. GTalk was developed on GNU/Linux, but I've also seen it run on Solaris, HP-UX, and IRIX.

Screen Shot

Here is a screen shot of the GNOME interface. Other interfaces will be similar.

Downloading GNU talk

These distributions are from before GNU Talk was hosted on SourceForge.

*gtalk-0.99.10.tar.gz

*gtalk-0.99.9.tar.gz


etalk-0.10.1.tar.gz The last officially released version of Emacs Talk, a BSD compatible unix talk program based in the emacs editor only.
Last updated: July 23, 1995


etalk-0.9.tar.gz Older version of my Emacs Talk program. Users of emacs 19.28 and earlier may need this version to use colors. (Emacs interface only)

GTalk Links

debian 2 (hamm) packages of gtalk maintained by Brett Viren < bviren@ale.physics.sunysb.edu >.

wmphone, a Window Maker applet replacement for xphone with many more features.


SourceForge Logo Send mail to zappo@gnu.org to contact me.

Copyright(C) 1997,98,99,2000 Eric M. Ludlam
Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.