Install Google Hangouts Client on CentOS 8

Hi Computingforgeeks community. In today’s guide I’ll walk you through the installation of Google Hangouts Client on CentOS 8. Google Hangouts is a cross-platform messaging application developed and owned by Google. Hangouts enables you to have conversation with friends, workmates and your business customers with direct messages, photos sharing, using emoji, and even group video calls for free.

There is no official Google Hangouts client available for Linux and we’ll be installing a third party client application called YakYak. YakYak is Desktop client for Google Hangouts with prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux 32 / 64 and Windows 32 / 64. Some key features of YakYak Google Hangouts Client are:

• Send/receive chat messages
• Send/receive SMS/MMS (Project Fi / Google Voice) — basic functionality
• Create/change conversations (rename, add people)
• Leave/delete conversation
• Notifications (using native OS notifications)
  • Toggle notifications on/off
• Drag-drop, copy-paste or attach-button for image upload.
• Hangupsbot sync room aware (no bot name, proper user pics)
• Show inline images
• Send presence/focus/typing/activeclient to behave like a proper client
• History scrollback
• Video/audio integration (open in chrome)
• Focus/typing indications (mainly a design issue. keep it clean)
• Offer alternative color schemes
• Translations in 22 languages so far:
  • English / Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil) / French / Spanish / Czech / German / Polish / Russian / Hebrew / Ukrainian / Slovenian / Korean / Tamil / Romanian / Swedish / Japanese / Italian / Danish / Bengali / Slovak / Turkish / Arabic / Telugu / Finnish /Breton / Simplified chinese
  • We’re looking for volunteers to translate the app to new languages

Install Google Hangouts Client on CentOS 8

Before we start the installation we need to check for the latest release of YakYak. As of this article update this is v1.5.9.

There are two options of pulling the latest release:

• Saving version as variable before downloading
• Using direct download link with version in the URL
• Using curl with grep functions to check latest release

Download Yakyak rpm package

Download the latest rpm package for CentOS 8. The same file can be used to install on Fedora, RHEL and any other Red Hat based Linux distributions such as Oracle Linux.

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/yakyak/yakyak/releases/latest 
  | grep browser_download_url 
  | grep linux-x64.rpm 
  | cut -d '"' -f 4 
  | wget -qi -

If for any reason curl command line tool is not available install it with dnf.

sudo dnf -y install curl

Once the rpm package is downloaded install it with the command below.

sudo dnf install libXScrnSaver
sudo dnf localinstall ./yakyak-*.rpm

Hit the y key in your keyboard to start installation.

Dependencies resolved.
=====================================================================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                      Architecture                                 Version                                          Repository                                          Size
=====================================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 yakyak                                       x86_64                                       1.5.9-1                                          @commandline                                        98 M

Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total size: 98 M
Installed size: 266 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded.
Running transaction
  Preparing        :                                                                                                                                                                             1/1 
  Installing       : yakyak-1.5.9-1.x86_64                                                                                                                                                       1/1 
  Running scriptlet: yakyak-1.5.9-1.x86_64                                                                                                                                                       1/1 
  Verifying        : yakyak-1.5.9-1.x86_64                                                                                                                                                       1/1 
Installed products updated.

Installed:
  yakyak-1.5.9-1.x86_64                                                                                                                                                                              

Using Google Hangouts Client on CentOS 8

If the installation was successful the software should be available in the Desktop launcher section or from the CLI.

Launching the application from the CLI:

$ yakyak

You’re asked to register or login with your Google account on initial run.

Once you’re logged in the Chat window will appear from where you can connect with your friends.

There you have it.. Yakyak is all yours now.

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