After using my Librem 5 as more of a toy over the past year, I am finally starting to get serious about making it my daily driver. The main hold-up has to do with finding the right SIP software. The Google Voice app doesn’t work on the L5 and I wouldn’t want to install the Google Voice app on to my L5, even if I could. I have a SIP account with voip.ms. That SIP account allows me to spoof my Google Voice phone number on the caller ID of those who I call using voip.ms (from my L5). I have tested this using Zoiper on my Android phone and it works well. I can forward my GV incoming phone calls to the Librem 5’s actual phone number (per the SIM) without feeling too compromised. So everyone who knows me will still recognize that it’s me calling still, even from my L5. And I’ll still get my incomming calls when people call my GV number. By design, no one who knows me knows that I use Google Voice nor do they know any of my real phone numbers (from the SIM on any of my phones). I only have one phone number (the Google Voice number), that anyone else knows about. After I find a good SIP client for my L5, I can port my GV number to voip.ms and be free of google once and for all.
As I have worked with the L5, I am finding it most practical to use a terminal where ever possible. The GUIs tend to mostly be incompatible with the L5, or they require too much RAM to keep up with the application in real time. This seems to be true often, even on apps that were adapted to work with the L5. The screen-incompatible apps are usually even worse. As a result, I end up spending a lot of time waiting for the screen to unfreeze on most apps on the L5. So I want to run my SIP software strictly from a terminal, if possible. I can write scripts to “call John” (for example from my address book), or to “call (phone number)”. At the end of the call, I could hit ctrl-z or ctrl-c to hang up and end the call. There would be no gui-induced bloat and likely no annoying delays in the process of making calls. This SIP software would need all of the advanced codecs also since the gnome-dialer only has the most primitive codecs (last I checked). I did get the gnome-dialer to actually work on the L5 with my SIP account. But the audio was extremely bad. Given these goals, does anyone know of some good SIP software that is known to run well on the L5, hopefully at least from a terminal? If not, does anyone here know of some terminal-based SIP programs that I might consider installing and testing on my L5? I am not accustomed to working with source files. I could probably follow carefully documented instructions to install from source code, if those instructions do not assume that I know much about that process. One missing “-” or one “…then just re-compile the program” (without saying exactly how to do that - every step) and I’ll be lost.
Update: This isn’t likely to be as easy as I initially thought it might be. In looking for SIP software that runs in a command line, I found a few that were written for Linux. But they are all written for, and have an “x86” in their installation program name, meaning they were all compiled to run on a PC. There is also an Android choice, meaning that the instruction set would likely be compatable with the Librem 5. But then the compiled program would be built to run on Android, not on Linux. So either way, it’s not likely that there is an existing SIP program with advanced codecs and a CLI interface in existance yet, until someone finds and compiles one for ARM, or builds it themselves from existing opensource code as a base.