Zoom-Client No Screen Share on Wayland

snap
1

Hi everyone!

I’ve been using the Zoom-client snap and it’s worked very well for me. Love it <3 However, now that Ubuntu 21.04 uses Wayland’s as default, the screen sharing functionality stop working.

As I could read on the github apparently there are problems with etc/os-release returns “Ubuntu Core” so the Zoom-client snap does not enable the screen sharing in Wayand.

Does anyone know more about this problem? I love using this snap, but I don’t know if it’s time to switch to zoom direct package or changed to x11 :frowning:

1 Like
2

Sounds like a problem with portals and/or pipewire. Can you double check that xdg-desktop-portal and pipeweire are installed?

3

No, it is a problem with zoom (and i think i wrote that in the zoom-client issues somewhere too …) it checks /etc/os-release and only allows wayland screensharing on a hardcoded list of distros … snaps report “Ubuntu Core” here (which is indeed not in that list) and that file can not be overlayed with a layout it seems …

4

Hi! @mborzecki @ogra

In other words, is there nothing to do? :frowning: I really like the snap, thanks for making it!

Maybe there is a way to tell the Zoom people to add to the list the “Ubuntu-core”? (I’m speaking from my lack of experience, just as a suggestion)

I think this is a really popular snap, so probably many people that move to Ubuntu 21.04 They’re going to run into this problem.

5

Right, my plan was to actually ask the zoom guys to get it added to the whitelist eventually … by my time to work on private snaps is recently a little short so i have not found the time to attack that problem …

OTOH it might be helpful for some other snaps as well to be able to map /var/lib/snapd/hostfs/etc/os-release to /etc/os-release inside the snap space to allow a snap to get info about the actual host system it runs on … which would be something that snapd would need to allow (in the layout implementation i suppose) …

6

AFAIU that won’t happen. The blessed solution for a snap wanting to know what system it is running on, is to plug system-observe and then inspect the contents of /var/lib/snapd/hostfs/etc/os-release.

2 Likes
7

Edit* So… there’s something that can be done? Maybe?

I hope so! <3

Thanks to both of you! :slight_smile:

8

Just in case someone else comes around with os-release issues like this one, i found a rather gross workaround to the problem (but hey, duct tape and strings hold the world together :slight_smile: and it works …)

Zoom gets its info from its own shipped libQt5Core lib which uses the hardcoded /etc/os-release path…

…to overcome snapd’s limitation of not being able to touch the actual /etc/os-release i have added a layout using the file path with 1 char changed pointing to a place to where i can copy the actual os-release file:

layout:
...
  /etc/os/release:
    symlink: $SNAP_DATA/os-release
...

now, from an override-build entry i monkey-patch this 1 char in the binary lib to read this file instead:

    override-build: |
...
      sed -i "s;/os-release;/os/release;" opt/zoom/libQt5Core.so.5.*.*
...

additionally i added the system-observe plug to my configure hook:

hooks:
  configure:
    plugs:
...
      - system-observe

and added the following shell snippet to the top of that hook code:

if [ -e /var/lib/snapd/hostfs/etc/os-release ]; then
    cp /var/lib/snapd/hostfs/etc/os-release $SNAP_DATA/
else
    logger -t $SNAP_NAME "can not find os-release file !"
fi

That’s it …

$ grep OS: ~/snap/zoom-client/current/.zoom/logs/zoom_stdout_stderr.log.old 
[CZPClientLogMgr::LogClientEnvironment] [MacAddr: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX][client: Linux][OS:  Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS x64][Hardware: CPU Core:6 Frenquency:4 G Memory size:32024MB CPU Brand:Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10600K CPU @ 4.10GHz GPU Brand:][Req ID: ]

Zoom now properly reports the content of the hosts os-release file and access to wayland screen sharing is judged based on the correct data …

3 Likes
9

Any news on this? I hoped snap might be a good way to keep up to date with the Zoom client, as it updates regularly and installing the debs manually (what Zoom suggests) is a pain. But with the snap I ran into this issue of not being able to share my screen. Going back to the debs, it works fine.