How to install Viber on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Objective

The objective is to install Viber on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

Operating System: – Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command is required.

Conventions

# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Download Viber Package

Let’s start by downloading the official Viber Debian package by using the wget command:

$ wget -O ~/viber.deb http://download.cdn.viber.com/cdn/desktop/Linux/viber.deb

After execution of the above command you should find Viber’s installation package within your home directory:

$ ls ~/viber.deb
/home/linuxconfig/viber.deb

Install Viber

Warning:
As pointed out by our readers ( see comments below ) the following Viber installation procedure will inadvertently remove libcurl4 from your system and replace it by libcurl3 package due to improper Viber package dependency definition. From this reason you are recommended to install Viber by using the following set of commands in order to preserve libcurl4 state on your system.

sudo apt-mark hold libcurl4
sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libcurl3 ~/viber.deb
sudo apt install -f
sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libcurl3 ~/viber.deb
sudo apt-mark unhold libcurl4

Alternatively, repackage the viber.deb package ( thanks Aleksey Komarov ):

$ dpkg-deb -x viber.deb viber
$ dpkg-deb --control viber.deb viber/DEBIAN
Edit viber/DEBIAN/control and repace "libcurl3" with "libcurl4"
$ dpkg -b viber vibernew.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i vibernew.deb

At the time of writing the Viber package seems to be a little bit troublesome and unmaintained. The default DEB installers including gdebi fails to fetch prerequisites and the Viber installation attempt results in the error:

Failed to open the software package
The package might be corrupted or you are not allowed to open the file. Check the permissions of the file.

The solution to installing Viber on Ubuntu 18.04 is to explicitly include the libcurl3 package prerequisite as part of the apt installation command:

$ sudo apt install libcurl3 ~/viber.deb

Start Viber

To start Viber application you can either run:

$ /opt/viber/Viber

from your terminal or search your start menu:

Click on the Viber icon to start the Viber application.

Viber Desktop on Ubuntu 18.04