Re: Skype access cancelled for Debian versions before 7
On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Bret Busby <bret.busby@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/08/2014, Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Bret Busby <bret.busby@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 03/08/2014, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 3/08/2014 4:39 AM, Brian wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> And the reason I decided to respond was to ask your reason for not
>> wanting to use wheezy. Or, rather, if your reason is more important
>> than your need to communicate cheap.
>>
>
> It is not a matter of communicating cheap.
>
> The ADSL/landline phone package that we have, includes free calls
> within this country, and, free landline calls to the countries that we
> are most likely to call.
>
> It is the videocalls facility - a technology that is way underused -
> "I don't want people to see what I really look like".
There are other reasons for not using video. (In my case, about a
thousand yen a month to raise my fundamental bandwidth, which won't do
much good because so many of the home routers here are, shall we just
say, cheap, and lately there has been a lot of low-level-protocol
amplified noise. (Assumed intentional, as in skriptkiddies trying to
prove their cred, but I'm not going to lay all the blame on the
skriptkiddies when the routers shouldn't have been vulnerable in the
first place.)
> I assume that wheezy is Debian 7.
Yeah.
> I have Debian 6 set up, and, whilst I have a more powerful computer
> with Debian 7 installed on it, Debian 7 appears to be "not up to
> scratch" when compared to Debian 6.
As in, ...
> I have now managed to get the Debian 7 computer working with LXDE -
> GNOME 2 is not available for Debian 7, but, LXDE wil probably do - it
> is the best desktop environment (insofar as suitability for me, is
> concerned) that I have so far found.
I feel your pain. Gnome 2 was useable.
XFCE is not unuseable, however. Well, not entirely.
> But, Debian 7 does not have iceape, and, Seamonkey is too dificult to
> get working.And, so, I will likely continue to use Debian 6, as my
> primary operating system, until an acceptable version of Debian, is
> available, with iceape (iceape seems to be excluded from one version,
> then reappears in a later version, then is excluded, then
> reappears...).
I like sylpheed, sort-of, but google's filters that don't really do
what I want, but make it a little easier to just ignore the arcanities
of e-mail filtering, well, they are addicting, I guess.
I admit that I have a lot of mail archives in various formats sitting
around, waiting for me to write a good program to decode them (much of
the mail contains a lot of shift-JIS characters) and automatically
layout a good set of directories so I can search through them
reasonably.
> So, I will continue to use Debian 6 for most of my stuff, and, may use
> Debian 7 from time to time.
>
>>> With the Skype 2.2 (beta), running on Debian 6, I was able to connect
>>> successfully, and, successfully make videocalls, with people running
>>> Linux, and, with people running MS Windows.
>>>
>>> It worked, so Microsoft broke it.
>>> [...]
>>
>> And you knew that was going to happen. Or you should have known.
>> Anyway, you definitely know now.
>
> No, I had no advanced warning, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
>
> But, I know now, and, have lost access to videocalls.
>
> Annoying.
I guess you didn't really want to believe that Microsoft's management
will never, ever let engineering put out good product, and if they do,
will absolutely never let them maintain it? (The OS, of course, is not
good product. Maintaining it is one of their revenue streams, even
though home users sort-of get the updates for free.)
>> So, you can build your own chat application if you want, including
>> video and audio. The entertainment and communication industries are
>> trying their hardest to prevent you from getting hardware that isn't
>> roped and tied to IP-laden standards, but you can still do it. All you
>> have to do is convince the people you need to communicate with to use
>> your application.
>>
>
> I do not have the skills.
>
> And, I am now too old, and past it, to learn skills like that.
Can you wire up a web cam? Show the person you want to talk with how
to do the same?
Take it a few steps at a time, get the connection working, then play
with basic authentication, then add https into the mix, with
self-signed certs. And if you're planning on monitoring an elderly
relative, maybe you'll need to write a little filter that does a
little byte-order scramble of the data stream, eventually.
How many different people do you want to be able to video chat with?
What's your purpose? Figure out what you want to do, and you probably
don't need skype at all.
>> Or update your OS or get a separate machine to dedicate to an
>> "ordinary user" level OS or something.
>>
>
> I have another computer, as mentioned above, that runs Debian 7, and,
> it gets powered up, sometimes. Using that, for something like Skype,
> is a bit like having a landline, and, plugging the phone in, for an
> hour or so, each week, or each month.
Skype wasn't originally a bad company. But good companies don't last
in this world. They tend to get bought by the Microsofts, et. al., who
always ultimately need revenue streams to skim. That's why RMS
invented the GPL.
And why the big companies work so hard to pervert it.
>> (I don't use skype, in spite of my sister's hints, because, as much as
>> possible, I don't want anything Microsoft touches on my stuff. When
>> wheezy goes unsupported and the only upgrade path contains systemd,
>> I'll have a hard choice to make. Hopefully, I'll be ready to use
>> openbsd on a daily basis by then. If not, I may decide to use skype
>> after all.)
>>
>
> I will likely continue to use Debian 6, long after its support ends. I
> have a Debian 5 computer, running, as it runs an application upon
> which I rely (although, no doubt, the wisdom of my continued use of
> the unsupported application, which is not available on Debian 7, and,
> I think, on Debian 6, running on the unsupported operating system
> version, would likely be challenged)
I had Mac OS X 10.4 hosting my personal web site for about six years
after apple quit supporting it. It was behind a firewall, but I
decided to quit pushing my luck and just took the site down. Saves
about 300 yen a month in power bills, to quit hosting myself. Makes it
hard to do things that used to help me make a living, but haven't
really helped in the last about ten years, I think.
> I had tried PC-BSD, but, could not install it, and could not get any
> support from the PC-BSD people or their mailing list. No
> acknowledgement of , and, no response to, the critical problems.
Life is an engineering problem -- trade-offs. It's also a dynamic set
of problems. What worked before won't work in the future.
I'm going to try installing openbsd again. Probably blog about it later.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.
Reply to: