Using Yugma to demo from your Linux machine

Currently our company pays to use Goto Meeting to coordinate meetings. Unfortunately, Goto Meeting does not work in Linux and consequently I usually connect to meetings from my Windows VMWare instance.

Today I had the need to do a demonstration with offsite coworkers and I needed to do it within Linux. Since I have used the free service called Yugma in the past and it supposedly works in Linux I decided to spend some time trying to get it to work.

Well see for yourself.
It took some time, but with their free online chat Help Desk (which unexpectedly was amazing) we eventually got it to work.

I image others wouldn't have as many issues as myself, but just in case here are some of the steps I had to perform to get this to work.

First, if you haven't already created an account, go ahead and create one (http://www.yugma.com). Then try visiting the Start a Session page. If you haven't already installed the software it should provide a link to download yugma. If not then you have issues like I did. Basically I had an old java version that FireFox was using and I had to update it to JRE 6. I followed their instructions here, but that wasn't enough.

With the help of the Yugma Help Desk I still had to do the following:

• sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-bin
• update-alternatives --list java
  this should print out
  /usr/bin/gij-4.1
  /usr/bin/gij-4.2
  /usr/bin/cacao
  /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
• sudo update-alternatives --config java
  [sudo] password for jlorenzen:
  
  There are 4 alternatives which provide `java'.
  
  Selection Alternative
  -----------------------------------------------
  1 /usr/bin/gij-4.1
  2 /usr/bin/gij-4.2
  3 /usr/bin/cacao
  *+ 4 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
  
  Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 4
  Using `/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java' to provide `java'.
• Then restart FireFox. Revist the Start a Session page and you should be golden.

As a developer I really like Yugma because it has a free version that allows you to invite at least 10 people. Which is perfect for developers. And since our Goto Meeting licenses are controlled its difficult to get a Goto Meeting scheduled on short notice (Although Josh Hoover is the King of Goto Meetings). The other nice thing about Yugma is its easy to start and share a session. I remember in Windows Outlook you could even install a package that put buttons in Outlook and set it all up; very handy.