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
Other Versions of this Tutorial
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
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: