Sep 3 2013
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
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.
25th November 2013 @ 5:14 pm
Sadly, even after this and rebooting, Firefox just never reaches the Virtual Room link in the first place; the Attend an event – HP Virtual Rooms tab just spins. (Chrome reaches the page, but clicking Go sends me to the Virtual Rooms connection problem page (with a link to the “For example: the 32-bit Xlib libraries,” but of course, it’s probably not supposed to work.)
Thanks, though.
25th November 2013 @ 5:23 pm
(Forgot to point out, in case of caring on-lookers or follow-up, that I’m running Mint 13 which is nothing more than a corrected Ubuntu 12.04 with cinnamon on top. There’s a great deal of “HP” that doesn’t work when a Linux guy.)
26th November 2013 @ 12:04 am
I feel your pain… 😉
If you start Firefox from a shell session, do you get any output similar to that quoted above? If you install the LiveHTTPHeaders plug-in, does this give any indication as to what the spinning tab is stuck on?
It’s also worth checking ‘about:plugins‘ to ensure that the plugin component (as opposed to the application component) of HPVR is correctly registered.
By the way, I assume that you are using a 64bit install?