HP Virtual Rooms on Linux

HP Virtual Rooms supports Windows (primarily), Mac OS, and Linux.

Getting things working on Linux, however, takes a bit of elbow grease…

The HPVR installer is a tarball with an executable installer script. Running this script moves and erases the extracted contents (including the containing directory – which can be very confusing for the user if they were *in* this directory when running the script, which is fairly likely).

Without inspecting the (now deleted) script, the installer would appear to have created ~/.mozilla/plugins/hpvirtualrooms-plugin.so – a 64-bit library which, on a 64bit OS, will silently fail. Less obviously, ~/.hpvirtualrooms has been created containing the actual application (as well as a few images, some sound files, and several files which are Windows-specific or seem to be cruft left over by Visual Studio), and this is only 32-bit.

Running the host browser manually shows the actual problem:

Command Line: /home/stuart/.hpvirtualrooms/hpvirtualrooms  -u "11185/YPrivacyOk|11185/Attendee" -t "WHP" -o "mgmt001.rooms.hp.com/NkOWOnGSnT1MLEPNN4S///2FuYsU3Q3xFTtuSDKpC7QJo9i50mLfIX5ILOpnvdpEvAN*uAyXWZ70h9qFBxcs42WMt18L3CAaHl/ZCfZ0uqop1qp5j1yeUt55WpqsQB*Cm2lf*FpUdn7NMV5oEHL36M0VIJlT5B7goiNzDSgvy9UJu1CINxM/nCpTNR0a2ZSfPFV*F8ZBCyoESmgsuMJxGc/pJfvEKDSWjDHZ4dAqiK4wh2uUwWCKu312QoCGh/ULRwuSmPPZeAmlLSMIQ7gVjdQfoSdyOPhR62Hawly4hmBqvSx82HHx" -m mgmt001.rooms.hp.com -p https://www.rooms.hp.com -a http://rooms.corp.hp.com/1sw/ed/default.aspx -c 16.238.89.68  -h http://www.rooms.hp.com/help  -l "en" &
cmd:/home/stuart/.hpvirtualrooms/hpvirtualrooms  -u "11185/YPrivacyOk|11185/Attendee" -t "WHP" -o "mgmt001.rooms.hp.com/NkOWOnGSnT1MLEPNN4S///2FuYsU3Q3xFTtuSDKpC7QJo9i50mLfIX5ILOpnvdpEvAN*uAyXWZ70h9qFBxcs42WMt18L3CAaHl/ZCfZ0uqop1qp5j1yeUt55WpqsQB*Cm2lf*FpUdn7NMV5oEHL36M0VIJlT5B7goiNzDSgvy9UJu1CINxM/nCpTNR0a2ZSfPFV*F8ZBCyoESmgsuMJxGc/pJfvEKDSWjDHZ4dAqiK4wh2uUwWCKu312QoCGh/ULRwuSmPPZeAmlLSMIQ7gVjdQfoSdyOPhR62Hawly4hmBqvSx82HHx" -m mgmt001.rooms.hp.com -p https://www.rooms.hp.com -a http://rooms.corp.hp.com/1sw/ed/default.aspx -c 16.238.89.68  -h http://www.rooms.hp.com/help  -l "en" &/home/stuart/.hpvirtualrooms/hpvirtualrooms: error while loading shared libraries: libSM.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

… which indicates the required fix – 32-bit compatibility libraries are reuqired. The installer performs no check for the presence of these, and the product web-page states only “To run HPVR on 64 bit versions of Linux some additional 32 bit libraries may be required to be installed. For example: the 32 bit Xlib Libraries.” – which doesn’t seem to be especially helpful in the circumstances…

On Ubuntu, the necessary packages can be installed with ‘apt-get install ia32-libs‘ or ‘emerge -v app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-xlibs‘ on Gentoo (although support is only officially provided for Ubuntu and RHEL 6.x, so I don’t know whether HPVR would actually work on Gentoo). On Ubuntu, this adds some 66MB and 221 pacakges to the host system.