Conducting Virtual Meetings With Linux, Part II - page 2

Setting Up Your Audio Streaming System With Integrated Chat

The tricky part of streaming audio and running a chat session together was that there were lots of process steps and quite a few parts that needed to function together. Fortunately, the programs usually worked with off-the-shelf defaults and were started by simply typing the program name.

Here is the grocery list of programs that I used for the streaming/chat machine(s):

• Apache - the http server. Usually included in your Linux distribution. I needed to make sure the http daemon was running, otherwise I couldn't hear anything. Apache and the Icecast server should be on the same machine.
• Icecast - the streaming broadcast server. I used the version bundled with SuSE 7.3. An RPM can be found at http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/freshmeat/icecast/icecast-1.3.0-1.i386.html.
• NotLame - the audio encoder. I downloaded the RPM at http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/not_lame.
• Liveice - the audio streaming controller. Again I used the version bundled with SuSE 7.3. RPMs for liveice can be found at http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice.html. The Melbourne LUG uses the Darkice package, so you might want to check out http://darkice.sourceforge.net/.
• Smixer, gamix - some type of audio mixer. Usually included in a Linux distribution.

The RPMs were installed using:

    # rpm -Uhv [application].rpm

Icecast, NotLame and Liveice can be installed in the /usr/local directory.