Savoir-faire Linux inc. and the SFLphone Development Team are very excited to announce the first public alpha release of a new voice, video and chat communication platform that requires no centralized server and leave the power of privacy in the hands of the user.

By adopting the same technology that is used by popular Torrent networks – Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) – this platform creates its own secure network over the Internet by which it can distribute directory functions, authentication and encryption across all systems connected to it – that’s why we call it Ring: http://ring.cx.

Just as SFLphone, Ring is also fully standard compliant and inter-operable with existing communication infrastructure such as most enterprise SIP phones and accounts. Some features that were part of SFLPhone-KDE are currently not available in Ring-KDE:

Akonadi integration is on hold until a KF5 enabled Akonadi version is released. As a workaround, using a shared vCard directory between Ring-KDE and the KDE4 version of Akonadi is possible.

The IAX2 protocol is not supported

The ZRTP encryption mechanism is no longer supported (please use TLS+SRTP)

Conferences, transfer and holding are known to be broken.

Translations are not fully re-integrated yet, this will be addressed soon

The KDE client is based upon SFLPhone-KDE and is now a KF5 application. The client now support the Ring-DHT distributed SIP communication cloud.

The client is now fully KF5 based

The Ring-DHT distributed communication cloud is now supported.

Better asset security awareness from top to bottom

The SIP negotiation code has been reworked for better standard compliance

Multiple dependencies including commoncpp/ucommon, ccrtp and zrtp have been replaced by LibAV

OpenSSL has been replaced by GnuTLS

The Ring daemon and LibRingClient have been ported to Windows and Mac OS X

An Evolution data server and a Mac OS X AddressBook contact backends has been developed for the Gnome and OS X clients respectively

If you wish to try this alpha version, to migrate from SFLPhone-KDE to Ring-KDE, it is recommended to re-configure each account manually. However, if you are adventurous, you can attempt to use the old configuration files directly:

$ cp ~/.config/sflphone/sflphone.yml ~/.config/ring/dring.yml $ cp -a ~/.kde/share/apps/sflphone-client-kde/ ~/.local/share/ring-kde $ cp ~/.kde/share/config/sflphone-client-kderc ~/.config/ring-kderc

To share vCards between Akonadi and Ring-KDE, please do:

(1) Open KAddressBook and File->New->Add Address Book

(2) Select “vCard directory”

(3) Select the “/home/your_user_name/.local/share/ring-kde/vCard” folder

(4) Press OK

It will now be possible to access and edit your contacts from KAddressBook. Again, this is a temporary workaround until a KF5 version of Akonadi is available (be it Akonadi-NG or a KD5 of Akonadi 1).

Packages are available for Kubuntu 15.04, Fedora 21 and Fedora 20:

$ sudo sh -c "echo 'deb [arch=amd64] http://nightly.apt.ring.cx/ubuntu_15.04/ ring main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ring-nightly-man.list" $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ring-kde

$ sudo wget http://nightly.yum.ring.cx/fedora_21/ring-nightly-man.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/ring-nightly-man.repo $ sudo yum install ring-kde

$ sudo wget http://nightly.yum.ring.cx/fedora_20/ring-nightly-man.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/ring-nightly-man.repo $ sudo yum install ring-kde

Read more:

Say Hello to Ring ― Ultimate Privacy and Control for your Voice, Video and Chat Communications

https://blog.savoirfairelinux.com/en/2015/ring-ultimate-privacy-and-control-for-your-voice-video-and-chat-communications

The Ring Project — Decoding a Decentralized and Secure Communication System

https://blog.savoirfairelinux.com/en/2015/the-ring-project-decoding-a-decentralized-and-secure-communication-system/

At the Heart of Ring: OpenDHT — A Distributed Hash Table

https://blog.savoirfairelinux.com/en/2015/ring-opendht-a-distributed-hash-table/