Looks like the recent video/voice chat plugin for linux is a stratergically set as a prerequisite for this big update! Now Gmail chat will have a new option to call real phones. This sounds like a HUGE competition brewing in sip world. Skype, especially, must be very worried, given the large base of gmail users. It also lacks a web client making it easier for roaming users to prefer gmail than their (might I dare say) own phone. This option requires you to have Google Voice associated with the gmail account. If you have not checked out Google Voice, its well worth the shot. Here is the preview of what it would look like
If you are in a place where you dont have internet (or have a bad one) You want to download .deb packages and install them offline. Each deb file is packaged as a seperate unit but may contain dependencies (recursively). apt-get automagically solves all the dependencies and installs all that are necessary. Manually install deb files one by one resolving each dependency would be tedious. A better approach is to make your own local repository. Before you actually make a repo, You need *all* deb files. You dont practically have to mirror all of the packages from the internet, but enough to resolve all dependencies. Also, You have to make sure, you are getting debs of the correct architecture of your system (i386 etc) # 1. make a dir accessible (atleast by root) sudo mkdir /var/my-local-repo # 2. copy all the deb files to this directory. # 3. make the directory as a sudo dpkg-scanpackages /var/my-local-repo /dev/null > \ /var/my-local-repo/Packages # 4. add the local repo to sour