I found/made a hack-around.
Operating system: Debian Wheezy
Date: September 23rd, 2013
Program of interest: Alltray
Desktop manager: XFCE4
Internet browser: Iceape/seamonkey (others could potentially be used; I do not know which ones)
So, what I did was that I opened my gmail account in Iceape navigator. I don't understand all of what it takes for a phone call to be incoming. There appears to be some mandatory requirement that at least one outgoing phone call be made. I'm not sure, and I don't fully understand it. I made an outgoing phone call. Afterward, I took a telephone and made an incoming telephone call to my Google phone number. From there, I hung up on the analog phone. Afterward, I accessed alltray from XFCE4 "Applications Menu." I selected AllTray from "Accessories," which led me to a dialog box asking what I wanted to tray. I selected the Iceape window. Afterward, the Iceape window was minimized to a tray icon in the upper-right part of the screen next to the time and the Internet connection bars.
From this point, I made a telephone call from an analog phone again to my google phone number. No Iceape window was open at this time: The Iceape window had become minimized. I made the telephone call, and fondly enough, I started to hear the Google telephone ring from the Gmail website. I right-click on the Iceweasel/Seamonkey icon, clicked "undock," and observed the telephone history.
Looks like a nice hack-around. The downside is that XFCE is being used, which might be nice for some older computers or people who don't mind the XFCE desktop too much. I think there may be a way getting AllTray to work in Unity or Gnome; but that may involve more hacking/hack-arounds.
Update:
I also tried Cinnamon (09-23-2013), and AllTray seems to have minimized Iceape Navigator (it gives a Seamonkey icon, however). I think that other desktop managers may work, and an individual would have to experiment to really find out. I experimented with Cinnamon; it was working at first, but then it didn't work. For XFCE, I allowed but one Iceape navigator window to access the Google Phone: This was to be a devoted Internet window. I made a panel bar launcher for AllTray, so that when I want to minimize the Google phone window again, I click the launcher and on the Iceape window in order to re-minimize the window back to the panel bar: I did this, because the top of the window, the window bar (or whatever it is called), was being placed under the top panel bar. Because of that, I decided simply having an AllTray launcher would be enough to suffice for why I was utilizing the window anyway: For the sole purpose of the Google Talk phone, so that a window would be "open" in order to receive incoming calls, hear rings, and make calls.
A similar AllTray methodology could be used for Google Voice, but it's the Gmail website that gives the sound of ringing combined with the Google talk plugin (.deb package) for Debian.
Comment about Simon Telephonics:
I called time and temperature (a local phone number for time and temperature) on my Google phone via the Simon Telephonics SIP technology, and the transmission was really choppy. I did not care for it at all. I came to believe that if I was making a telephone call through the SIP middle-man (simonics.com), then a lot of the phone call would be difficult to have: "Excuse me, could you repeat that? You're breaking up."
That kind of thing. This AllTray hack-around works much better, I think.
ANOTHER UPDATE:
I was playing with the alltray from using gnome-terminal in XFCE.
It would appear that the only browser I can get to work with the command-line terminal and alltray at the same time is iceweasel.
$ alltray iceweasel
http://mail.google.com & exit
Using
http://www.mail.google.com does not work. I'm not sure why.
That would be a useful script to turn it kind of into a daemon. The user would have to be logged on, however.
It may be useful as an XFCE startup program.
ANOTHER UPDATE: 9:32 P.M. CST (09-23-2013)
I recently played with XFCE startup and session startup. I'm not too familiar with the coding of how to get things moving with that, but I made a googlephone.sh in the home directory.
googlephone.sh
I added that to the session startup options for XFCE with...
bash /home/enteryourusername/googlephone.sh
The sleep command is in there for the wireless connection to start before the browser is opened. I'm sure with enough time and coding, it can be much more sophisticated and elegant. However, I'm looking for quick and efficient.
As a nice benefit of making it a start feature, however, it's now part of the XFCE panel as a tray icon, which is clickable. When clicked, it shows. When clicked again, it hides. That's freaking awesome, as I had previously developd a panel launcher of alltray in order to hide it after showing it again from the tray. Good stuff.
If anyone is having trouble with XFCE, sessions, and garbage at startup, consider removing crap from the /home/asdfasdf/.cache/sessions folder.
Also, it's a good idea to manually exit the iceweasel tray icon when done, because otherwise it's going to open up multiple taps, for what I experienced, when logging out of XFCE, because firefox/iceweasel won't be properly shut down if you just log out: at least that why I think I've had multiple tabs opening while the iceweasel was alltray'd at start-up of an XFCE session.
UPDATE: 09-24-2013 @ 1:20 AM CST
I recently noticed that the WebRTC VoiceEngine, which appears to be viewable (in the current Gnome/Unity/whatchamacallit desktop manager) under the soundsetting from the sound icon. I'm not sure what other sound option people have, but I've noticed there appear to be some audio issues with using the Google Talk Plug-in. However, playing with audio configuration seems to help the issue. I'm not exactly sure what the issue is, however, and I firmly believe it's some kind of bug or un-noticed aspect of the gtalk plugin for Debian system. I'm using 64-bit as of writing this.
For me, at least, toying with the application sounds in unity seem to do something about it.
What I did was the following:
1. Create a new user account
1a. Login to new user while using Unity/Gnome desktop manager
2. Go to youtube and play Enya - Only Time
3. Listen to see if the quality was somewhat decent as expected (it was)
4. Go to gmail and call my Google Phone
5. Check for quality of the incoming call
What I noticed at step five was that the incoming phone call ring was extremely scratchy. This is where I chime in that you get what you pay for when it comes to Linux, and it's all free. I looked at what was going on in the sound settings during all of this, and I noticed that it was the WebRTC VoiceEngine that was being scratchy. It was tampering with the sound quality of the Enya - Only Time song, too. The scratching, however, appeared to be independent of the enya song, thus dependent on the WebRTC plug-in/file/app/whatever. In other words, the Linux gtalk plug-in is not good enough. At least, I believe that the gtalk plug-in is what the real issue is.
However, I toyed with the sound settings while in the Gnome/Unity desktop manager, and eventually the scratchy sound let up. I'm not too sure how to go about doing that in XFCE; but I can recall quickly playing with alsamixer while an incoming call was occurring (while the phone was still rining), until I could get the scratch to go away. Generally, it was me playing with the master volume, brining it to about 50%, which made the scratch go away, and then I turned the volume back up.
I don't know what that would work; and I'm sure there is more underlying code and problems involved. However, it can be toyed with to get working.
