Being 2016, there are a lot of ways to get on a video link between people.
While Skype, Viber, Whatsup or anything else can open a video connection and can be used between friends, in business world the options are a little bit more limited.
One of the option that is on par with the time is google hangout, and if your company has google apps, you can set up nice meeting, directly attached to your calendar invitation. It’s awesome and I like it a lot. My choice.
However, in biz space old habits are hard to die, therefore people stick to things like gotomeeting, which is not too bad, or the worse thing ever supported on Linux, WebEx.
To run the WebEx on Linux is a nightmare, to put it mildly. The WebEx is a java application, but they made sure that you can only run the 32 bit, and you can launch the applet only using a Firefox 32 bit installation. As I said, they may have their own reasons, but honestly I don’t really get it, and I think it is super crazy.
After battling with it for at least 4 hours, I found a reproducible way to get it going.
Here are the steps:
1) Install Firefox an 32 bit and some libraries for nice appearance.
sudo apt-get install firefox:i386 libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 gtk2-engines-murrine:i386 libxtst6:i386
2) Download the jre from oracle:
This is the link where you can pick the jre. Get the tar package, not the rpm http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html
3) Create a dedicated dir and untar it there
mkdir ~/32bit cd ~/32bit tar xvf ~/Downloads/jre-8u73-linux-i586.tar.gz
4) Add the plugin to firefox
mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins
5) Link the plugin
ln -vs ~/32bit/jre1.8.0_73/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
Now you are all set!
In my test I was able to share the screen, to use the audio from the computer, and everything was working ok.
Good luck, and honestly, if you can, avoid WebEx.