mgetty ringing, and also vgetty...

• Messages sorted by:[ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]

Hi

Two things...

First a fairly simple suggestion: I use the same phone line for incoming
voice and data calls, so mgetty is typically in ringback mode. However I'd
like to receive one or more automated data calls during the night. The
problem of course is that then the real phone would ring, which would
disturb my sleep. I could disactivate the real phone's ringing when I go to
bed and reactivate it the next morning, but I don't like this solution
because of two important drawbacks: first I risk forgetting the phone on
when I go to bed or off when I get up (thus missing some calls). Second, if
there's some emergency call coming in during the night or early morning, I'd
miss it.

An idea I had was to have the phone's ringing always turned off, and have my
computer make some noise when the modem says "RING".

What I'd like is for mgetty to run an external program whenever it sees a
"RING" from the modem. That external program would or would not, depending
on the current time, make some noise (through the pc speaker or a sound
card, or write something at the console, or anything...). mgetty would have
to spawn that program independently of answering the phone, so if it's on
ringback I could here the sound and pick up the phone before it does.

I don't think this would be very hard to do. Could it be including in mgetty
some day? Is there a cleaner way of doing what I want do do?

The second thing I wanted to ask was is this list appropriate for discussion
of vgetty? I have a USR modem with voice support (I'm not sure it's the best
one to have for voice support but it's the one I have) and I'm trying to get
vgetty to work with it. I've made some progress, but I'm no expert in voice
modem nor vgetty code.

The FAQ says that the voice extensions are maintained by Klaus Weidner.
However the work does not seem to have progressed since april, and that
person did not answer the mail I sent. So I'd like to know if anyone is
interested is interested in discussing vgetty and help me with a few
things... The points that remain to settle are:

- zplay, if called with -D, must stop the playback as soon as a dtmf tone is
detected, which it does not do. This may be caused by a different modem
behavior...
- How to improve sound quality? It's really not very good. This may be
hopeless...
- Conversion of the sound files to any of the conventional formats. THis is
the most important of my problems. The utilities provided with vgetty are
for zyxel and don't seem to work with the encoding used by my modem. I'l
have to do my best to get through to USR technical support and get the
necessary information... Would the "rockwell.c" program work? Where is the
missing external rint() function?
- Finally, getting vgetty to officially support USR voice modems...

Thanks in advance for any answer to any of my two questions...

-- 

Stephane Doyon
  Bacc. specialise en informatique                    doyons@IRO.umontreal.ca
  Universite de Montreal                              doyons@JSP.umontreal.ca

       A quote from StarTrek:

I never met anyone with more drive, determination or more courage than
Jean-Luc Picard.
    -- Adm. Hanson, "The Best of Both Worlds (pt II)," stardate 44001.4.