Squawk is a chat tool designed for gamers that offers both text and voice communication capabilities.
At the moment, there are no official releases for this project, but there are nightly svn snapshots available for download from the website. To install Squawk on GNU/Linux, you need to ensure that Speex, ncurses, and ALSA are installed. After that, type 'sudo make install' in the source directory.
The Squawk server is called squawkd. You or one of your friends must run the server, or you may find a public server to join before you can chat. To start the server, just run squawkd. On the other hand, the Squawk client is called squawk. You need to run it and type '/connect some.host' to connect to a server. After you are connected, you can use IRC-esque commands to list, join, and part various channels on the server.
For instance, '/connect' enables you to connect to the specified server address, which may be a canonical name or a numeric IP address. '/disconnect' disconnects you from the current server. '/list' lists channels presently available on the server, with those you are already in denoted by an asterisk (*). '/join' enables you to join a specific channel that the server automatically creates if it does not exist yet. Conversely, '/part' lets you leave a specified channel, and others in the channel are notified when you do. Finally, '/quit' allows you to disconnect from the server and exit squawk.
While in use, alt-< and alt-> enable you to cycle through the channels you are currently engaged in so that you may maintain several conversations simultaneously. Nonetheless, you can only hear one channel at a time.
Version 2006-12-31: N/A