Debian and google-talkplugin

A few months ago I lost the capability of making phone calls through Gmail on my Debian laptop or through Google Voice. While it was a bit of an annoyance, I never minded it much because I always had my phone or my Windows 8 laptop available and I could use them instead.

A few days ago I tried using Google Hangouts out of curiosity because it keeps getting props as a good service to make video calls with and since Skype keeps getting worse and worse all the time.

Okay, so Hangouts only works on Chrome. Fine, I’ve got Chromium installed. Fire it up, install the extension… then nothing. Hangouts couldn’t connect to the AV hardware. Logged in to Gmail, tried making a phone call… same thing.

Now I had two separate browsers have the same issue on the same system. A bit of searching drove me to a few blog posts here and there, but nothing in detail. Then I struck gold with this post buried in the Google Products forum:

This worked for me:

This turned out to be a libudev problem. It seems I had two versions installed for some reason. Removing libudev0 solved the problem. My version of chrome depended on that version, so I had to reinstall that as well.

$ dpkg --get-selections | grep -i libudev
libudev0:amd64 install
libudev0:i386 deinstall
libudev1:amd64 install
libudev1:i386 install
$ apt-get remove google-chrome-beta
$ apt-get remove libudev0
$ dpkg -i ./google-chrome-beta_current_amd64.deb

First I checked what libudev libs were installed, finding out both libudev0 and libudev1 were installed just like in the forum post, so the fix was pretty straightforward:

# aptitude remove chromium libudev0 iceweasel
# aptitude install chromium iceweasel

That was pretty much it. After this, I tried placing a call through Gmail on Iceweasel and had no problems. Firing up Chromium and trying to initiate a video call reported no issues either.

Everything is as it should be. Now if Google published a version of Picasa native to Linux…