This blog entry may seem a bit offtopic. But Pentaho uses webex quite a often, and I'm a linux user. I had multiple problems using it properly, so I figured I should write a blog post on how I set it up for future reference (yeah - I mostly write blog posts so then I can later come back and see it... a public note pad)
Basically, there's a couple of issues with webex on linux 64 bits. Some reported solution involves installing a 32 bits version of firefox and java - which is at best... hum... well, silly!
I took some time to debug it, and found some very interesting info on the internet, that I took as main reference. The rest was mainly trial and error. I used firefox (the latest version, currently 29) and the latest java7 package / mozilla-java-plugin (java-1.7.0-openjdk-amd64)
From what I could gather, the problem is that webex for linux is dynamically compiled against a 32 bits system. Webex downloads it's dependencies to a folder on the home directory, in ~/.webex/. We can check with:
Next step is to find which libs aren't linked, for which I use ldd
apt-file is a good utility to find out where to get those packages:
After that, we need to find the best candidate for this package, and install it. The important bit is that we need the 32 bits version. We need to follow this procedure for all missing deps. In the end, these are the packages that I end up installing (Note: I wasn't able to fix the missing dependency on libjawt.so, but even without it everything seems to work)
And that's it!
-pedro
Basically, there's a couple of issues with webex on linux 64 bits. Some reported solution involves installing a 32 bits version of firefox and java - which is at best... hum... well, silly!
I took some time to debug it, and found some very interesting info on the internet, that I took as main reference. The rest was mainly trial and error. I used firefox (the latest version, currently 29) and the latest java7 package / mozilla-java-plugin (java-1.7.0-openjdk-amd64)
The problem
From what I could gather, the problem is that webex for linux is dynamically compiled against a 32 bits system. Webex downloads it's dependencies to a folder on the home directory, in ~/.webex/
pedro@arpeggio:~/.webex/1324 $ file libatdv.so
libatdv.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
Next step is to find which libs aren't linked, for which I use ldd
pedro@arpeggio:~/.webex/1324 $ ldd *so | grep not
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => not found
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => not found
libjawt.so => not found
libjawt.so => not found
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => not found
libXft.so.2 => not found
apt-file is a good utility to find out where to get those packages:
pedro@arpeggio:~/.webex/1324 $ sudo apt-file find libpangoxft-1.0.so.0
libpango1.0-0-dbg: /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpangoxft-1.0.so.0.3600.3
libpangoxft-1.0-0: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpangoxft-1.0.so.0
libpangoxft-1.0-0: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpangoxft-1.0.so.0.3600.3
After that, we need to find the best candidate for this package, and install it. The important bit is that we need the 32 bits version. We need to follow this procedure for all missing deps. In the end, these are the packages that I end up installing (Note: I wasn't able to fix the missing dependency on libjawt.so, but even without it everything seems to work)
sudo apt-get install libxmu6:i386
sudo apt-get install libpangox-1.0-0:i386
sudo apt-get install libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386
And that's it!
Other distributions
This is for ubuntu, specifically for 14.04. For other distributions the method of using ldd to identify the missing deps is the same. Finding which package provides it... it's another story.-pedro