With Audio and Screen Sharing Enabled
This guide is based on the below resources:
- mshkrebtan gist from which it was forked
- mcarans answer in AskUbuntu
- Official Cisco page for Linux 64bit support (or actually lack thereof)
The problem is that Cisco doesn't support 64bit Linux for WebEx. Actually if you run any 32bit distro, it works. Since that is so 20 years ago, our aim is to enable Multiarch so that we can have all the necessary i386 packages installed and have a self-contained Firefox 32bit installation with 32bit JRE and an isolated profile that won't interfere with the rest of our system for the sole purpose of opening WebEx links.
The other workaround is to download each time the .jnlp file and then open it using the 32bit javaws. I have not tried/setup this solution extensively but up to the point to have the 32 bit supporting binaries it is the same. Then you just run javaws [run-options] <jnlp-file> each time to launch the WebEx.
Add the i386 architecture to the list of dpkg architectures :
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Install the libraries required to execute ELF-32 executables:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
Beginning with Firefox 52 (released March 2017), plug-in support is limited to Adobe Flash, and drops support for NPAPI, impacting plugins for Java, Silverlight, and other similar NPAPI based plugins. Hence you need the ESR release. You can read more on that here: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/firefox_java.xml
Download Firefox ESR for Linux (32-bit) from here.
Unpack it to somewhere, for example to /opt/webex/:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/webex/
sudo tar -xjvf firefox*esr*.tar.bz2 -C /opt/webex/
Install the libraries required for Firefox (i386) to run smoothly:
sudo apt-get install \
libgtk-3-0:i386 \
libasound2:i386 \
libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 \
libxt6:i386 \
libxtst6:i386 \
libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 \
libcanberra-gtk-3-module:i386 \
topmenu-gtk3:i386
Download Oracle JRE for Linux (a tar.gz archive for x86 architecture) from here.
Unpack it to /opt/webex/:
sudo tar -xzvf jre*linux-i586.tar.gz -C /opt/webex/
sudo mv /opt/webex/jre* /opt/webex/jre
Create symbolic links for the Java browser plugin libraries:
sudo mkdir /opt/webex/firefox/plugins/
ln -s \
/opt/webex/jre/lib/i386/libawt.so \
/opt/webex/jre/lib/i386/libjawt.so \
/opt/webex/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so \
/opt/webex/firefox/plugins
sudo apt-get install \
libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386 \
libxft2:i386 \
libpangox-1.0-0:i386 \
libxmu6:i386 \
libxv1:i386 \
libasound2-plugins:i386
cat << 'EOF' | sudo tee /opt/webex/firefox.sh
#!/bin/bash
export ENV_HOME=/opt/webex
export FIREFOX_HOME=$ENV_HOME/firefox
export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=$ENV_HOME/firefox/plugins
export JAVA_HOME=$ENV_HOME/jre
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
#export JPI_PLUGIN2_DEBUG=1
$FIREFOX_HOME/firefox --no-remote -P
EOF
This script will start a new instance of Firefox with the ProfileManager. Choose an existing Firefox profile or create a new one.
You might want to specify a specific profile to start with. Just add the
profile name after the -P flag.
Don't forget to make the script executable:
sudo chmod a+x /opt/webex/firefox.sh
You might want to create a symlink, like this:
sudo ln -s /opt/webex/firefox.sh /usr/local/bin/firefox-i386
Launch the script and join a Webex session.
If webex.com sends you a jnlp file and Firefox asks what to do with it, just
download it. Further, in the Firefox Preferences > Applications, set the action
for JNLP files: they should be opened with javaws (Java Web Start) which can
be found here:
/opt/webex/jre/bin/javaws
Find out what required libraries are be missing (note that the session number may be different):
ldd ~/.webex/T30_MC/*.so | grep "not found"
You can use http://packages.ubuntu.com/ to find out which packages contain the libraries.
It is OK to have libjawt.so being not found.