Long it lasted, but now Google has the Google Talk Blog announced that the Gmail voice and video chat is now available for Linux. Currently, there are packages for Debian and Debian based distributions like Ubuntu or Sidux. Later, also RPM packages for Fedora or OpenSUSE also be published. The functionality of the Linux version should be on par with the capabilities of the Windows or Mac OS X version.

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The installation is trivial: If the voice and video chat page, click “Install voice and video chat” on the button, grab the deb file and install the package by double clicking. Meanwhile, there are RPM packages for Fedora or OpenSUSE.

Maybe

Required dependencies are installed automatically from the package manager. After restarting the browser, can play audio and video calls are started out from Gmail. More information is available from Google itself. Thus, there is finally an alternative to Skype for audio and video communication over the Internet to all major desktop systems, while driving out unfortunately the proprietary Skype with the devil Beelzebub Google.

An “open” remedy it with XMPP / Jingle client dominates the Audio-/Video-Chats under Windows. Thus, it is good that with Gmail voice and video chat is at least one alternative to Skype.

[UPDATE] I just see it in the chat settings of Gmail now provides some new options for voice and video chat. You can check here whether work-in microphone and webcam, select Audio-/Video-Geräte which should be used and also specify that hopefully anonymised data for transmission quality can be sent to Google.

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