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MJ on Linux - Unofficial method?



 
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dishe
magicJack Apprentice


Joined: 27 Mar 2009
Posts: 18

PostPosted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 1:53 pm    Post subject: MJ on Linux - Unofficial method? Reply with quote

Like many of us, I'm desperately waiting for a Linux version of MJ (Mostly because I happen to own some energy efficient Linux boxes that I have no problem leaving on 24/7).

I read somewhere here (I think) that someone plugged their MJ into an EEE PC, and it was recognized as a sound device (the software obviously doesn't work yet, but the hardware is apparently sort of standard), and the user was able to make and receive a Skype call using a handset plugged into the RJ11.

Now, if we are able to strip the SIP info and make MJ work on softphones, shouldn't it be possible to have a Linux softphone app running on MJ's network, and using their supplied adapter hardware? In other words, can't we already run an MJ on Linux with the resources available to us?

Perhaps someone has done this and I missed it in my search... I haven't tried setting up my SIP (just got the MJ days ago, haven't had enough time yet), but wanted to share in case no one has thought of it yet.\

EDIT: Whoops!!! I found it:
http://www.phoneservicesupport.com/linux-softphones-t739.html

Seems to be relatively low key, considering the amount of people who've been asking for this...
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pagemen
Dan isn't smart enough to hire me


Joined: 15 Dec 2008
Posts: 128

PostPosted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 5:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MJ dongle will appear as a usb sound card in Windows(as well as other OSes) so voice can be routed to a regular phone. This part will work in Windows/OSX and Linux, and can be used with other softphones.

But the dongle also has the ability:
1. Generate dial tone so one can dial from the phone
2. Ring the phone
3. Pass CID to the phone

the above makes MJ dongle a true USB ATA adapter, which is unsupported in other softphones and Linux.
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dishe
magicJack Apprentice


Joined: 27 Mar 2009
Posts: 18

PostPosted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 6:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

pagemen wrote:
MJ dongle will appear as a usb sound card in Windows(as well as other OSes) so voice can be routed to a regular phone. This part will work in Windows/OSX and Linux, and can be used with other softphones.

But the dongle also has the ability:
1. Generate dial tone so one can dial from the phone
2. Ring the phone
3. Pass CID to the phone

the above makes MJ dongle a true USB ATA adapter, which is unsupported in other softphones and Linux.


Ah, I see. So there wouldn't be any dialtone or access to dialing this way. Well, that's not a very good solution at all! Thanks for explaining.
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MaxxFordham
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Joined: 16 Apr 2009
Posts: 26

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 11:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

pagemen wrote:

But the dongle also has the ability to:
1. Generate dial tone so one can dial from the phone


Um... actually, you don't need a dial tone for a regular phone to to be able to dial; it's only there in the mJ dongle so that we, who've been so used to hearing a dial tone in landline service, to indicate that service is present, won't be thrown off when we try to use the phone.

Now, why that kind of thing hasn't translated into our being thrown off by not hearing a dial tone when we put our cell phones into dialing mode (like if they worked the same way as cordless phones did--going from "off" to "talk") I'm not so sure.
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mberlant
Dan Should Pay Me


Joined: 01 Feb 2009
Posts: 829
Location: Japan

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Dial Tone is there to inform the caller that the service is ready to accept a phone number. If the Dial Tone is absent, the caller knows that the service is not available.

This is unnecessary with a cell phone because the display and/or indicator LED on the phone provides the information to the caller. This is why cell phones in the US market offer only pre-origination dialing (put the number in before hitting the SEND key).
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MaxxFordham
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Joined: 16 Apr 2009
Posts: 26

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

(I know that I can edit a response, but I just wanted to erase and start over. See below. Too bad I can't just completely erase one of my comments as well as editing.)

Last edited by MaxxFordham on Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
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MaxxFordham
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Joined: 16 Apr 2009
Posts: 26

PostPosted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mberlant wrote:
The dial tone is there to inform the caller that the service is ready to accept a phone number. If the dial tone is absent, the caller knows that the service is not available.


Yeah, but what I was saying is that the phone, itself, actually doesn't need to hear a dial tone in order to make the call. The dial tone is only for our benefit, not in order for the phone to be able to do its job. If the system didn't have a dial tone, but was still connected properly, the phone would still be able to dial out through it.


mberlant wrote:
This is unnecessary with a cell phone because the display and/or indicator LED on the phone provides the information to the caller. This is why cell phones in the US market offer only pre-origination dialing (put the number in before hitting the Send key).



Actually, only the LCD tells us if the phone's service is present, not an LED. The LEDs only light the keys, etc., whether or not the phone is in service. But anysay, well, when I was talking about a cell phon's service indicator, I meant "audible," "audibly," etc. Ya don't always look at a phone's display before trying to use it.

By the way, the oldest cell phones didn't have much of a display, but they still didn't use dial tone, which is why I still think it's a tad interesting that they don't have them. No big deal, just interestingly different.[/b]
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mberlant
Dan Should Pay Me


Joined: 01 Feb 2009
Posts: 829
Location: Japan

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

MaxxFordham wrote:
Yeah, but what I was saying is that the phone, itself, actually doesn't need to hear a dial tone in order to make the call. The dial tone is only for our benefit, not in order for the phone to be able to do its job. If the system didn't have a dial tone, but was still connected properly, the phone would still be able to dial out through it.
In fact, every phone that is automated in this manner does listen for Dial Tone prior to dialing out, for the very same reasons of efficiency and courtesy that humans should listen first. If you don't listen for the Dial Tone first you run the risk of having the first few dialed digits ignored by the telephone switch because it wasn't ready to accept them yet.

MaxxFordham wrote:
Actually, only the LCD tells us if the phone's service is present, not an LED. The LEDs only light the keys, etc., whether or not the phone is in service.
On your cell phone you currently own, perhaps. But many phones still in service and still being sold have a status LED, as well. All of my Motorola phones, for example, blink red for no service, green for home service and yellow for roaming service. My two year old Nokia blinks blue when service is available.

MaxxFordham wrote:
Ya don't always look at a phone's display before trying to use it.
Perhaps you never noticed your own LED because you only look at the display after something goes wrong instead of looking at it to prevent something from going wrong.

MaxxFordham wrote:
By the way, the oldest cell phones didn't have much of a display, but they still didn't use dial tone, which is why I still think it's a tad interesting that they don't have them. No big deal, just interestingly different.
All mobile phones, from the earliest ones in the 1940s, had visual indication to tell the user whether the phone was available for use. And, the earliest automated IMTS phones did use Dial Tone to tell the user when to start dialing.

A green light indicated that a channel was available for use. The user picked up the phone and allowed a few seconds for the phone to signal its User ID to the switch. Upon validation, the switch opened up the talk path and provided Dial Tone.

Even today, some phones sold in other countries (notably, Japan) offer the option of pressing the green button first, listening for Dial Tone, and dialing the number. It's up to the user to decide which ergonomic method fits him/her the best.

In the late 1970s, cellular phone technology introduced out-of-band control to mobile telephony, which introduced the concept of pre-origination dialing and obviated the need for a Dial Tone. Several manufacturers of the day, notably EF Johnson, carved out a niche in this market by selling cell phones that faked this process by presenting a Dial Tone to the user. The entire Japanese cellular industry decided that the public wasn't ready to comprehend pre-origination dialing, so the option to dial via Dial Tone was available on every Japanese cell phone until very recently.

I hope this has clarified more than it has confused.
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MaxxFordham
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Joined: 16 Apr 2009
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 6:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mberlant wrote:
In fact, every phone that is automated in this manner does listen for Dial Tone prior to dialing out

1. I wasn't specifying whether a phone was automated in some way or not. It doesn't matter.

2. Even if it did matter, what you just said is wrong, because I have a cordless phone that can do the number preentry thing, and it does NOT matter: you can have it plugged in and hearing a dial tone, or not, and it doesn't care; it'll send its dial tones out either way. (It just pauses as if waiting for how long it knows it takes before it will receive the dial tone, in order to make sure the call will work.) Any landline phone will dial whether or not it hears a dial tone (which by the way, doesn't need to be capitalized as if it were a title).

But you're right, that we need to listen for a dial tone to make sure the connection is ready to take a call, or else yeah, if the tone's not there, while the phone WILL dial, the connection might miss those numbers and therefore not make the call.


mberlant wrote:
But many phones still in service and still being sold have a status LED, as well.

Okay, I'm sorry, I never remembered seeing a cell phone with a service indicator that used an LED besides and LCD for that. But I see that I could be easily wrong to assume there never was one. I still think it would be cool to hear a dial tone on a cell phone, though.


mberlant wrote:
All of my Motorola phones, for example...

How many cell phones do you have, and why does one person need that many to use at once? Or are you just talking about previous phones that you still have but were only being used one at a time and then replaced with a phone that's an upgrade over the previous one?


mberlant wrote:
Perhaps you never noticed your own LED because you only look at the display after something goes wrong instead of looking at it to prevent something from going wrong.

Actually, no cell phone I've had used an LED for the status of the service. The only LEDs were for lighting the keypad and on one phone, side lights that would indicate "ringing" while the phone was in silence mode, and also for if I opted to have those blink while taking a picture with it (but which I didn't opt for) (and maybe the LCD backlight is an LED, too, but I don't know about that).

Plus, I've never really heard of being concerned about whether something would go wrong with the cell phone's status. As for if service is just not available, I don't know if that can really count as "somethiong going wrong." But when you said "go wrong," were you just talking about that, or were you referring to another possibility?

But then you mention the display as if it were made of an LED. Hmmm... Are you sure you're not really just talking about a little icon in just part of the color LCD (which is the kind of status indicator I see on these phones here)?

On those cell phones that you say had one or more light emitting diodes to indicate the service status, what would the labeling look like? Was there just a little dot or bar poking through a hole in the case, and a little bit of embossed type in the case that said "service status" or something like that? Or what do those look like, exactly?


mberlant wrote:
All mobile phones, from the earliest ones in the 1940s...

Whow, mobile phones in the 1940s? How were there supposedly mobile phones in the 1940s when even basic cordless phones didn't come out until the 1980s? And even if they did have a visual indicator, I don't think LCDs or LEDs were around in the market for practical use back then. What would they have had: just a small incandescent light bulb?

And if that's so, then why didn't they put visual service-available indicators in landline phones that early--or why don't they even now, to go along with the dial tone (just like you said, like those oldest supposed mobile phones supposedly had a dial tone, too)?


Hmm, I didn't know they do have current-day cell phones in Japan, etc. that DO have dial tones! Why don't they have those in the USA, then, even with preorigination dialing, since it sounds like you have the option there in Japan, and since there are landline cordless phones that have preorigination dialing?

And why did the Japanese cell phone market think the Japanese people weren't ready to comprehend that option for so long?


Very interesting. (And thanks for not being so rude and quite as down-talking to me this time.)
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