zoom.us snap package

===========================

Abandoned

This repo is abandoned and will be removed soon. It seems to me that zoom.us is officially maintained on flathub. So for people who want to use zoom.us please go to flathub instead. https://flathub.org/apps/details/us.zoom.Zoom

"zoom.us" is a client to connect https://zoom.us/ - a conference website. However, official site provides a deb package for installation which is quite dangerous for the system. Now Ubuntu provides a new packaging format called snap which can pack all its dependencies inside. And it runs on a squashfs which is isolated to the system rootfs. Also snap packages can be used on many other distros.

This document describes how to make a snap package for zoom.us client. However, we cannot re-distribute the snap package to you because of the proprietary license of that client so please make the snap package by yourself.

Create a pbuilder environment of Ubuntu Xenial.

Because we want to install some deb packages and we don't want to taint your system, please create a pbuilder environment for Ubuntu Xenial at first by the following steps:

1. Create xenial chroot environment

   pbuilder-dist xenial create
   

Note: pbuilder-dist is in ubuntu-dev-tools package. Please install it first.

sudo apt install ubuntu-dev-tools

Building the snap package inside the chroot environment.

1. Make an empty directory in /tmp

   mkdir /tmp/p1
   

2. Login into the chroot environment. Also bindmounts /tmp/p1 so that directory is shared between chroot and the outside system.

   pbuilder-dist xenial login --bindmounts /tmp/p1
   

3. Install some packages

   apt-get install git snapcraft
   

4. Move to the tmp directory

   cd /tmp/p1
   

5. Download our source

   git clone https://github.com/grandpaul/zoom.us-snap.git
   

6. Go into the project directory

   cd zoom.us-snap
   

7. Download the client deb from the official site and put into the deb subdirectory.

   mkdir deb
   # download the deb and drop the deb inside
   

8. Make deb subdirectory a rough local repo

   cd deb
   dpkg-scanpackages -m . | gzip -c > Packages.gz
   cd ..
   

9. Add local repo to /etc/apt/sources.list. Note: this is the sources.list inside your chroot, not the one on host.

   echo "deb [trusted=yes] file:///tmp/p1/zoom.us-snap/deb ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/50-zoom-client.list
   

10. Install zoom inside chroot

    apt update
    apt install zoom
    

11. Run snapcraft

    snapcraft
    

Now you have your snap package generated in /tmp/p1/zoom.us-snap

Install and use.

• Install snapd on your host system to be able to use snap packages.

  sudo apt install snapd
  

• To install the snap package. Please use the following command:

  sudo snap install --dangerous zoom_2.0.98253.0707_amd64.snap
  

• To run zoom client, please use the command:

  snap run zoom