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Setting up WebEx on Ubuntu 14 04 64 bits

Setting up WebEx on Ubuntu 14 04 64 bits

This blog entry may seem a bit offtopic. But Pentaho uses webex quite a often, and Im 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, theres 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 its dependencies to a folder on the home directory, in ~/.webex/. We can check with:

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 arent 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 wasnt 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 thats 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... its another story.


-pedro

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