Ekiga SIP telephony
In the end, the setup wasn't too bad, but it did take quite a bit of getting used to. Not the most intuitive process.
Basically, get yourself set up with Ekiga, which on Ubuntu Edgy is available in the Ubuntu repos, and then once you've signed up for an Ekiga account (which you can use for PC-to-PC calls) you can also sign up for a PC-to-Phone account. I chose to use the one that's built into Ekiga (with Diamondcard ), as I figured it would work better, but also that there might be some kick back to the Ekiga project from Diamondcard, so that supporting it would be a good thing. Not sure if I'll stick with them once I'm all set up - will depend mostly on call quality and rates.
In any case, the big gotcha for me was that I was getting "Security check failed" even after I'd verified that I had everything set up correctly (which I could do by going through the configuration wizard, and then calling the "echo test" (which just repeats back to you whatever you say to it to show it's hearing and to verify you can hear that) at "sip:500@ekiga.net". I put in a support request to Diamondcard, and got a return reasonably promptly telling me that I didn't need to include the first "00" for my call. So, for instance, to call a number in the UK such as 0207 123 4567 you would call "sip:442071234567" not "sip:00442071234567", as I'd seen in some of the online docs.
Anyway, all set up and looking forward to using it, being able to track call history, and seeing what other benefits IP telephony can bring!
