Author: sphillips

WebEx on 64-bit Ubuntu 13.10

Periodically, I use WebEx with work. It seems like it is just often enough to remind me that I didn’t make sure it was working since my last install.

Well, thanks to Russ Lowenthal, I found an easy fix to get it working.

Ask Ubuntu: How to I make Cisco WebEx work with 13.10 64bit?

Existing directory

Well first, he has you look for missing libraries in the config directory. The problem is, I had two of them already.

$ ls $HOME/.webex 
1124  1424  lastshareindex.bak

I just deleted the directory to start from scratch.

rm -r .webex/

I started a new WebEx from my browser. I just logged into the meeting and ended it. After that, I had just one directory there:

$ ls $HOME/.webex 
1424

As a side note, the Meeting Center opens at this point. I just can’t share my desktop or view someone else’s.

Finding Missing Libraries

Next, I ran this command to identify the missing libraries.

ldd $HOME/.webex/1424/*.so >>check.txt

I could have opened the check.txt with gedit or something like that. It was easier to use grep to find all of the “not found” lines:

$ grep "not found" check.txt 
	libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found
	libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found
	libXmu.so.6 => not found
	libXtst.so.6 => not found
	libjawt.so => not found
	libjawt.so => not found
	libXmu.so.6 => not found
	libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libXft.so.2 => not found
	libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => not found
	libpangox-1.0.so.0 => not found

Then, I installed the apt-file program.

sudo apt-get install apt-file
apt-file update

Finally, I used it to search each of the libraries that were not found.

$ apt-file search libXmu.so.6
libxmu6: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXmu.so.6
libxmu6: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXmu.so.6.2.0
libxmu6-dbg: /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXmu.so.6.2.0

Once I knew the libraries, I could use that to install them. Not each of these actually installed packages because some were dependencies.

sudo apt-get install -y libgtk2.0-0:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libxmu6:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libgcj14-awt:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libxft2:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libpangoft2-1.0-0:i386
sudo apt-get install -y libpangox-1.0-0:i386

I didn’t even have to reboot or even restart my browser. The next meeting worked fine and showed me the shared desktop.

Ubuntu 13.10 Bugs: Gnome-Settings-Daemon Crash

Originally, when I would first boot up, I would get numerous errors about the Gnome-Settings-Daemon crashing.  Here’s my research into fixing those.

A note on Ask Ubuntu mentioned installing libgnome-desktop 3.8.4….

I used Synaptic Package Manager to see that “libgnome-desktop-3-7” was already at 3.8.4-ubuntu1.1.  Just as a guess, I tried installing “libgnome-desktop-2-17“.

That actually fixed the error messages on boot up!  I also noticed that it fixed some of the programs that didn’t look quite right.  The theme was broken for some reason, and this fixed it.

Note: I think that some of this might be related to installing Nvidia Prime.

Update: I used Synaptic to uninstall the “libgnome-desktop-2-17” package, and my problems didn’t come back.  So, that must not have been the exact problem.  Maybe some dependency to that package was the problem or it was something that didn’t completely uninstall.

Resources