Or, "Why 2014 will NOT be the year of Linux in the desktop".

So, it happens that my mum (66 yo) has been a Debian user for over a year now. With highs and lows, she manages to do what she needs; sometimes I need to intervene.

Today I thought I could send her a quick email explaining how to download using BitTorrent, because of reasons. So, as I was writing, I realised that in many torrent sites, you only get a magnet link these days. No problem! Click on the magnet link, at it should work automagically.

Then I remembered: it works on my computer, because I've spent a couple of hours some time ago researching how to make FireFox work with magnet links, creating a custom script, etc. I hoped that by now this must have been solved, at least in Debian unstable.

Wrong again. I created a new user in my computer, launched IceWeasel/FireFox and boom: I get a dialog asking me to select a program, not from a list of desktop applications, taken from one of the gazillion sources where applications are defined, but just from any place on the file system! (At least, now you don't need to go tweaking with the hidden FireFox configuration editor).

I was very angry at the brainiac at Mozilla who thought it was a great idea to ignore the host system and do their own MIMEtype handling. And then, tried Chromium to see what would happen... And I get first a scary message telling me that it is going to use the super-obscure xdg-open program to open my link, and that it could harm my computer! It was followed by another very helpful dialog telling me something like:

Unable to detect the URI-scheme of "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:diePh6iengei4quaep4shai8ahshahnae9 oolahtetheir2bohmu1eelaChui1ohdahruegh4wief6PusahDae4ho oshahjoogai7bae9shuvei9shufeX4boog8neichi3OoDee5ei9Uori c6aingairepon9gok8Mee7uRahphah4EucoopheiYin4xe4lahn0goh"

Then the real fun started...

I starting looking around to understand how this is supposed to work, I wanted to provide a patch! So, it turns out that if you add some values to GConf this should work.

So, try to find where would that be. Read about GConf schemas, default and mandatory values, and their 10 possible locations. Find that Azureus provides an schema, use that to create one for Transmission. Then find that in fact, Transmission was providing defaults, which are not the same but work the same, and that they had an error there: yes, problem found! (#741069)

No! It turns out that the Gnome desktop does not use that any more, and now they scan the .desktop (who knows in which of the 100 directory tress where .destop files are present) files for MIME handlers, and the transmission-gtk.desktop file had that correctly. So why does it not work?

Well, it turns out that if I used gvfs-open instead of xdg-open, it did work! The thing is, I am running XFCE here, which is GTK based, but it is not Gnome: instead of gvfs-open, I was getting exo-open, which is it's brain-dead cousin, and can't do anything but files, email and web.

It is fecking 2014, and we still don't have a sensible, unified way to select preferred applications. We still have incompatible, duplicated, incomplete, competing implementations. We have FreeDesktop doing one thing to try and unify criteria, which is then ignored or mis-implemented up and down by some desktops and applications.

Some days I get really angry at the Free Software world.

PS: I guess I will tell mum to copy&paste the links from the browser to the torrent client, but not today. I have already lost 4 hours of sleep on this.

Continuing with my tendency to vent about stuff, today I want to talk about telephony.

Since a few years ago, I need to use different VoIP providers to keep in touch with friends and family, in different parts of the world.

So, I have a DID in Argentina (bought trough the excellent DIDWW), and another one in Ireland (which came for free when I was using BlueFace for call termination). I also have a service to handle outbound calls (FlowRoute), but it is not necessarily the only one I use, as cost and quality of Internet calls vary wildly. I have also used several Betamax providers, the aforementioned BlueFace, tried Netelip, etc.

This results in having soft-phones installed in my mobile devices and laptop, and a hardware SIP phone that I carry around; all of them having configurations for at least 3 different providers. This does not lead to hilarity.

In light of this, it's been a long time since I want to set up my own SIP router to be able to handle all of this, and be able to register to a single SIP proxy that will handle all the complexity.

Last Friday, the Irish DID decided to stop working. It turns out, that since I don't have my own setup, I was using that provider as a kind of hub, with their provided voicemail, and terminating the Argentinian DID there. So the damage was big.

This made me spend way too many hours during the weekend trying to set up some SIP solution. And I am not pleased.

Asterisk

First, I went with the old and known Asterisk. The default installation in Debian puts 95 configuration files in /etc/asterisk, which you are supposed to review and adjust. Yes, you've read correctly: ninety-five different configuration files. None of them having anything close to a sensible explanation of their syntax or function. Also, not a remote hint of consistency.

I could not find any configuration helper in the Debian archive, just hundreds of PHP-based projects scattered around the web. All the started guides I've found only guided you for the most basic tasks, but did not give you a way to have a functioning system.

Needless to say, after a short time I grew tired of this, and decided to try something else.

Way too many options

After this, I have spent an inordinate amount of hours, just trying to comprehend the difference between the gazillion different VoIP systems out there, I am still struggling to see that. Even if I understand that X is not a PBX, I don't exactly need a PBX, and most products deliver at least some of the features I need. It seems none of them makes a good job of just explaining what you can or can't do with their software.

Documentation is awful in all the projects I researched. When it is there at all, it is incomplete, maybe super detailed at points, but in most cases, there is just no big picture view of the system to just start understanding how things work, and how to find your way.

Sadly, not even the distros seems to be able to put a list of "recommended VoIP software for different needs".

Yate

Finally, I've found YATE (Yet Another Telephony Engine). It seemed promising: not too bloated, fairly extensible, and scriptable in a few languages!

Sadly, after many hours, it turned out to be a fiasco. The documentation seems decent, until you realise there are many key details left out. Basic information about how a call is handled cannot be found anywhere. Using the scripting power, I was able to find out at least the variables that were available, but that was not enough. I found a mailing list (with the worst archive reader I've seen in ages), where people made the very same questions I have, and nobody has replied. In years.

So here I am, stuck with not being able to tell if a call is coming from a random host on the internet, or one of my DIDs, or one of the authenticated clients. I guess I will have to start from scratch with Yet Another (Another) Telephony Engine.