HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

At the summit, we tried getting Link-Local chat (also known as Bonjour in the Apple world) to work. This protocol searches the local network (on the current router) for anyone else using the protocol and shows them in your contacts list. This is very cool.

If it works.

Well, you can make it work in Diablo, it just needs a hack right now (fix coming soon, say the Collabora guys).

UPDATE: USE THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST TO GET THIS WORKING!

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Curious, why Mac users? This used by a standard Apple program, or just a popular one?

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

It's used by the standard iChat program.

Cool, would be good to have more people using it for the next summit (add your irc nick to your name too)!

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

I think it should be required for any gathering of tablet users. Great way to chat with people in the room, and put names to faces.

I also would love to get Windows people using this. You can download Bonjour for Windows here; does anyone know of a Windows chat program that can use the protocol?

EDIT: Yes, it looks like Pidgin for Windows can do it. No excuses for you not to have this on any and all of your laptops now! :D

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

With those repos I've only got 0.6.16-3maemo2 available. Installing them worked; reboot: still no joy :-(

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

That's not right; the Diablo repos should have a version 0.6.23-2maemo3 and if you don't see that when you do an "apt-cache policy avahi-daemon" then you might have your repos set up wrongly.

"no joy" means it isn't even showing up on your account types list, and you can't even create an account, or you can create an account but you aren't going on-line? My hack fixes the latter problem. I don't know what to say about the former problem.

What happens when you run it explicitly from the command line, like the Collabora guy suggested?

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Ah, ok - still no joy with the GUI. The Collabora guy was stumped too, so cool toys for me may have to wait :-(

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

I can't help but wonder that if you set up your repos so that you could see the new version of avahi-daemon, things might install properly for you.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

OK I should probably have done what was advised here, but I knew better :o

I found the package "Pidgin Bonjour Support - Pidgin and Telepathy Bonjour Support" in Extras today and thought that, well, I could simply install it and get Bonjour/Avahi-support for the built in IM client ("and Telepathy"!).

No. Didn't work. I didn't even see my N800 in my Avahi Browser on my desktop. I also didn't have any new options in the account setting that would let me set up a Bounjour/Avahi-Account.

I could start /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon manually and see the N800 as a device, but not offering any services.

Step 2: I installed Pidgin. Pidgin now allows me to set up what they call a "Bonjour-account". Once I do this, the corresponding service shows up in the Avahi Browser and the account I set up on Pidgin/N800 pops up in Pidgin on my desktop - if and only if I started etc/init.d/avahi-daemon manually before. (OK, I could add this myself, but I don't want to right now because... see below)

Still, from Pidgin on my N800, I cannot see the the Bonjour Account that I have on my desktop. Trying to initiate a chat from the desktop (where I see my N800) fails.


Can any of you guys who know what Avahi really is and how it works give me a hint where to start looking for errors? The most important one is this one-way-mirror effect: I can see my N800 from Pidgin on my desktop but not the other way round. First step would be to have it work in Pidgin reliably, both ways.

Then I'd love to have it work with the built-in IM client... I only use SIP and XMPP-based services normally, so I don't want to run a multi-protocol client that only duplicates this functionality. Maybe I got carried away by the package description saying "...and Telepathy Bonjour Support" and there's still something else to be installed, but it would be cool if it could be done with as little additional hackery as possible... I don't want the next SSU to fail because of this, you know. ;)

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

benny1967: Did you downgrade your avahi after installing Bonjour support (as I posted in the first post)? That "fixed" it for me.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

qole: not yet. i'm scared of command line package manipulation.

also, i thought that if pidgin and pidgin bonjour support are both the same version and packaged by the same person, avahi should at least work for pidgin ... (my understanding was that you downgraded in order to make it work with the built-in client, right?)

so before i do apt-something, i'd rather be absolutely sure there's nothing wrong with my setup (=all the files in /etc/avahi, both on my desktop and on my n800). i thought i could check by installing pidgin on my laptop... if it doesn't work as expected between laptop and desktop, i'll know it's not a n800-only problem.

of course it would also be good to know if anyone got pidgin working with bonjour on their tablets without doing any additional magic on the command line.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

qole, on a related subject -- could you please help me narrow down what do I have to install just to get the avahi-daemon running, so that I can see my tablet from the Mac computer and address it in ssh/scp by name, not the IP address?
thanks!

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

@stangri

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...d.php?p=228138

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

As far as I understand it, the built-in client's avahi-bonjour support also uses the Pidgin libraries... It uses telepathy-salut.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Works! Works! Works! :D

The error wasn't on the N800-side. It was my wireless router. I had multicast disabled on the wireless interface. Enabling it made Avahi work for the "Pidgin to Pidgin" setup between my N800 and the desktop. No downgrading, no hackery. Great! (The only thing is I need to start the Avahi daemon manually, but I'm not gonna change this as long as I'm experimenting... Each daemon not running is a good daemon ;) )

Mhm... Now it's getting hairy. If I understand you correctly, there's no Avahi-support in Telepathy out of the box in OS2008. The part that would add this to Telepathy is Telepathy-Salut. Telepathy-Haze might work, too (as it simply adds whatever Pidgin offers, and Pidgin can connect via Avahi). In order to get it to work, I first need to get through all the hassle described at the rtcomm-homepage (red pill, download installer,...) and then downgrade the now working Avahi-installation to a version that will be compatible with the current rtcomm-stuff.

I think I'll just leave it the way it is... Doesn't seem to be worth it. I can if I want (via Pidgin) and I'd rather not screw up my system to I point where the next SSU might fail. ;)
Still I hope that there'll be better support out of the box in future releases of OS2008. It's just sooo cool!

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

I'm going to have to reflash my tablet and try installing telepathy-haze and bonjour support again, because my understanding is that you don't need the rtcomm beta anymore to get these things. They should just be there, in the Nokia repositories.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

At least I don't see any Telepathy-related packages in the application manager. I try to be very conservative with repositories, mainly extras/diablo and only a few others for some apps I really don't want to miss.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Afraid not; I had a pretty clean N800 here, so I took it through two SSUs (no problems :)), enabled Diablo extras, and added the Chinook repos.

Neither of those seems to show up in the app mugger; also apt-cache search telepathy turns up no telepathy-haze or similar.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

I tried this on a N800 that I recently reflashed with diablo and I didn't need to downgrade avahi or use chinook repos.

What I did was install the rtcomm beta BUT, on the rtcomm website the link to the installer is (http://rtcomm.garage.maemo.org/deb/r..._0.5_armel.deb). I did a quick check and the latest version is 0.7 (http://rtcomm.garage.maemo.org/deb/r..._0.7_armel.deb) which has proper support for diablo.
So I installed 0.7 and I added a link local account in Account settings and ran Pidgin in Linux on my desktop and added an "Bonjour" account and I set my status to be online on the tablet and both N800 tablet with diablo with rtcomm and ubuntu computer with pidgin saw each other.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Do we know why such packages don't make it into regular OS releases or at least into extras? From what you tell me, at least the telepathy-salut-support seems to be stable, at least more stable than, for example, modest when it was first included. Knowing it works but scaring users away by installation instructions that resemble exorcism is a strange strategy.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

It's a very good question; while it didn't precisely scare me off (I don't scare easy ;)), it did seem like way more hassle than it was worth. I'm finally trying to actually do the rtcomm today.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

qwerty12, very good news. Benson, make sure you relate your experience, too.

It would seem that someone needs to update the RTComm website.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Yeah, I got it working, I think. Installed via qwerty12's link, ran the installer, everything installed fine, I guess. Now I have to get it installed on another machine to test, though...

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

For Link Local testing, you can also install Empathy on any Linux machine.... Including a tablet with Easy Debian / Deblet :D

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Nothing like talking to yourself for that mad feeling...

http://i34.tinypic.com/2mg02ah.png

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

OK, today I felt that after even installing the Fennec alpha, I could try to get rtcomm-beta running. I think I did (not quite sure, but it looks good.)

But: Avahi still doesn't start automatically. maemo-control-services says its in the list of services that should start at boot time, but I don't see my N800 in the Avahi-browser and get this on the command line:

Only when I run "etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start" manually I get the whole thing going.
I'm not familiar with the way Debian handles services (I'm on gentoo here), but from what I guess we have a default raunlevel "2", right? There's a /etc/rc2.d/ directory, which has two avahi-entries:
So probably the tablet tries to start them when I switch it on; could it be that S14 and S16 indicate it's started too early so that services it depends on aren't yet running?

It would be helpful to see the configuration of somebody who has a working setup so a can just copy-paste... (or, better, you could try to teach me how to properly use update-rc.d on Maemo ;) )

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

I have been trying to get the exact same thing running on the scratchbox environment. Could you please tell me how to go about testing this on the scratchbox environment? I have installed the avahi-daemon on Diablo Scratchbox environment. How do i proceed from here?

If we downgrade the avahi daemon will the installation be proper in the scratchbox emulator?

Thanks

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Running avahi by rc-scripts while booting up doesn't work here, too.

I think, rc-scripts are the wrong place. Avahi has to be started by the nework-manager after connecting to the network and receiving a IP-Number. Without network, avahi-daemon can't attach and build up the upd-network.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Up and running now - changing the startup-links from S20avahi... to S21avahi... got it working.

More description here - http://thpmaemo.blogspot.com/2008/11...-on-maemo.html

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Thanks! I couldn't figure out why avahi worked for a while and then stopped, now I know the reason and I fixed it.

BTW, I don't think I have the avahi-dnsconfd installed, just the daemon works fine for the discovery.

Re: HOW TO: Get Link-Local (Bonjour) Chat working under Diablo
 

Ok, on a new install, I had to first install the RTComm beta 0.7, then downgrade avahi stuff as in my first post. Without the downgrade, link local appears to be active, but no computers show as online.

On a related note, I also had to downgrade libpurple0 to get MSN and ICQ to work:

This installs a crapload of stuff, but it works....