Louis-Philippe Véronneau - zoomhttps://veronneau.org/2020-03-30T00:00:00-04:00Using Zoom's web client on Linux2020-03-30T00:00:00-04:002020-03-30T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2020-03-30:/using-zooms-web-client-on-linux.html<p>TL;DR: The zoom meeting link you have probably look like this:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/j/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<p>To use the web client, use this instead:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/wc/join/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<h2>Avant-propos</h2>
<p>Like too many institutions, the school where I teach chose to partner up with
Zoom. I wasn't expecting …</p><p>TL;DR: The zoom meeting link you have probably look like this:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/j/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<p>To use the web client, use this instead:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/wc/join/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<h2>Avant-propos</h2>
<p>Like too many institutions, the school where I teach chose to partner up with
Zoom. I wasn't expecting anything else, as my school's IT department is a
Windows shop. Well, I guess I'm still a little disappointed.</p>
<p>Although I had vaguely heard of Zoom before, I had never thought I'd be forced to
use it. Lucky for me, my employer decided not to force us to use it. To finish
the semester, I plan to record myself and talk with my students on a Jitsi Meet
instance.</p>
<p>I will still have to attend meetings on Zoom though. I'm well aware of Zoom's
<a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7e599/zoom-ios-app-sends-data-to-facebook-even-if-you-dont-have-a-facebook-account">bad</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/zoom-makes-it-too-easy-for-hackers-to-access-webcams-heres-what-to-do/">privacy record</a> and I will not install their
desktop application. Zoom does offer a web client. Sadly, on Linux you need to
jump through hoops to be able to use it.</p>
<h2>Using Zoom's web client on Linux</h2>
<p>Zoom's web client <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629443-Zoom-Web-Client#h_2da60ac7-455e-466f-85d1-974aa68f0703">apparently works better on Chrome</a>, so I
decided to use Chromium.</p>
<p>Without already having the desktop client installed on your machine, the
standard procedure to use the web client would be:</p>
<ol>
<li>Open the link to the meeting in Chromium</li>
<li>Click on the "download & run Zoom" link showed on the page</li>
<li>Click on the "join from your browser" link that then shows up</li>
</ol>
<p>Sadly, that's not what happens on Linux. When you click on the "download & run
Zoom" link, it brings you to a page with instructions on how to install the
desktop client on Linux.</p>
<p>You can thwart that stupid behavior by changing your browser's user agent to
make it look like you are using Windows. This is the UA string I've been using:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36
</code></pre></div>
<p>With that, when you click on the "download & run Zoom" link, it will try to
download a <code>.exe</code> file. Cancel the download and you should now see the infamous
"join from your browser" link.</p>
<p>Upon closer inspection, it seem you can get to the web client by changing the
meeting's URL. The zoom meeting link you have probably look like this:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/j/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<p>To use the web client, use this instead:</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><code>https://zoom.us/wc/join/123456789
</code></pre></div>
<h2>Jitsi Meet Puppet Module</h2>
<p>I've been playing around with Jitsi Meet quite a bit recently and <a href="https://forge.puppet.com/smash/jitsimeet">I've written
a Puppet module</a> to install and configure an instance! The module
certainly isn't perfect, but should wield a working Jitsi instance.</p>
<p>If you already have a Puppet setup, please give it a go! I'm looking forward
receiving feedback (and patches) to improve it.</p>