I am not a fan of Facebook, however one of my contacts wants a voice conversation. He says the messaging client would be better than in-browser voice call.

Now, I see the only place to get the messaging client for Linux is here:

https://messengerfordesktop.com/

I downloaded the .deb in a Slackware64 VM and converted it to a .tgz with deb2tgz - I then used installpkg to install it. It gave me the warning "package not created with makepkg".

However, it seems the package installed fine, it launches fine and seems to operate OK. So should I be concerned that something is up or will this be OK? I use my Slack VM as a testing ground before installing on my 32bit netbook Slack install.

You should be more concerned that you are on Fakebook in the first place.

Use qTox.

About the warning, you should be fine. It's just complaining that you converted it and didn't "make" it.

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I know - I am not a fan of Farcebook as I say - but I cannot deny its power and usefulness for academic research. My work hinges, to a large extent, on contacting people in the Middle East, and FB is a very easy way of doing so. A lot them are only able to use their mobile phones for such.

Hadn't heard of qTox, thank you for that. I wish other people were as likeminded as you and I. But in some parts of the world, I believe it's just not feasible to use anything but the most popular software.

Android? Antox....
iOS? Antidote....

And a slew of others for *nix and winblowz. Not to mention secure.

Ah, I was primarily talking about FB. Sorry for not being clear.

And yes, there are other IM programs for Android etc but I won't ask my contacts to install different software because of my ethical beliefs. I'm pleased enough that they are communicating.

But this libre software realm does bring in a different ingredient to the research paradigm. Software is such an important part of academic research nowadays and most people use MS/Apple, of course. We had a talk on notetaking software the other day and it was Windows/Mac based. I don't think many people in music academia [my field] have even heard of Linux. I do have a feeling that the ethical side of FOSS will creep more into my research, I just don't know how.

It could be a concern if any of the files are also in other packages and the file list is not in the exact format required. Whoever is developing deb2tgz should be creating the package with makepkg and not using tar directly.

You could sanitize the package by extracting it into a temporary directory with explodepkg, and then recreating it again with makepkg. You'll get no warnings after doing that.

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Thanks, Patrick. I used explodepkg/makepkg with the existant .tgz and was able to successfully create a new package which installed without the warning through upgradepkg --install-new.

For the life of me I can't find the old messengerfordesktop package to remove it. I have tried slackpkg info messengerfordesktop, slackpkg file-search messengerfordesktop, ls /var/log/packages | grep messenger etc, no sign of it. Just as well this is on a VM, I will look for a way to remove it but apparently it can be tricky with such packages.

EDIT: managed to remove it with removepkg messengerfordesktop-2.0.9-linux-amd64

It gave me some warnings that certain unique directories contained new files but the package was uninstalled. A little messy maybe but I'm putting this down to experience.

I reinstalled the sanitized one and it works fine.

Just as an FYI... It's easy to find the last few packages installed by sorting the output of /var/log/packages by date.

Ah, great, thanks for that bass, I'll use it in future.

I'll mark this as solved for now.

I had a two hour phone call with a contact in Egypt using the application and it was excellent, the call quality was probably the best I'd had on the internet - noticeably superior to Skype, no connection drops and very clear audio. For anyone stumbling across this topic I really recommend the application for VOIP. The only thing to note is that CPU utilisation was around ~70% throughout the call, so if you're going to be making a long call on a laptop, make sure it's charged.

I couldn't record the call on OBS since OBS [on its own] was near 100% CPU utilisation running idle, so I just made notes, which was fine. In the future I shall address this issue with OBS in another topic. Or I shall attempt to record with Audacity, though that has been problematic in the past.