Re: Viber on Debian
On 01/24/2014 07:35 PM, Man_Without_Clue wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Has anyone successfully installed Viber opn Debian?
>
> Completely lost man
>
Hey, I wrote the following as a basic troubleshooting guide. Scott was
right, though. You really should have put more info in your first
email, at least letting us know that you were able to install it, but
clicking on the menu item didn't bring up anything. This list may have
very few people using a particular program, but it's full of great
troubleshooters.
So, I went ahead and tried it out on a Debian Wheezy VM I have. First,
I'd like to point out their linux support probably isn't that great. The
site says almost nothing about linux, and strongly implies it *doesn't*
have a linux client. It took a little hunting around to find the
software. (It's "Viber for desktop")
For me, "sudo dpkg -i viber.deb" went fine, and it showed up in the
"Internet" section of the menu. Clicking on it produced no feedback,
even after several tries.
The first thing I try in these kind of situations is to run it in a
terminal. (This is something several people would have suggested if your
original email had given more info.) That didn't work, I got "command
not found". So I went back to the menu, looked at the properties of the
Viber link, and discovered it's supposed to run "/usr/share/viber/Viber.sh".
Running *that* in a terminal gives a useful error message:
"/usr/share/viber/Viber: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version
`GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by /usr/share/viber/Viber)".
Putting "glibc in Debian" in a search engine tells me stable/Wheezy has
glibc 2.13, while testing/Jessie currently has 2.17. Clearly Wheezy's
GLIBC is too old.
So I tried it in my up-to-date Debian Testing/Jessie VM. Sure enough it
now.... still doesn't work. I did get a flicker of a window outline,
but nothing else. Running /usr/share/viber/Viber.sh just returned
"Segmentation fault".
That's pretty much where I stop with something I'm not invested in. :)
I did read /usr/share/viber/Viber.sh, it just runs
/usr/share/viber/Viber after making sure it can access some libraries in
/usr/share/viber. Nothing fancy. I also tried using strace, but didn't
get info that was useful for me (I'm not that used to strace output).
I'd suggest dropping Viber and using something far better supported. But
what if that's not an option? The first thing most people (especially
those less experienced) will ask is "Can I upgrade GLIBC to a newer
version?". Technically yes, but it's a really bad idea to do so on an
important system. Glibc is used by almost everything, so problems with
that can mess up the system in odd ways.
The other option is to run things in a virtual machine, linux container,
or chroot. That's abit complicated to get into here, but it's worth a
try. We know that in this case, testing/Jessie doesn't work, so perhaps
try a Wheezy install with updated glibc that's only used to run Viber?
Seriously though, I don't think it's worth the effort. Especially since
their support section doesn't acknowledge they even *have* a linux client.
- PaulNM
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