Recently, I tried to prepare for an alfaview session. alfaview is a video conferencing system and used by the university where I teach data security. Only earlier this year alfaview introduced Linux support, and only for Debian-based systems. My system is rpm-based (Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Fedora / CentOS), so what to do? A tool like alien did not work for me. Here is what I did to make alfaview run on my rpm-based Linux system.
Simply Unpack
I downloaded the alfaview install package for Debian (.deb). Debian packages, .deb files, are just Unix "ar" archive files with another two archive files included. One holds metadata, another the actual install data. After realising it, I created a local directory "alfaview" and unpacked most of the data archive into it.
You need the executable, the two included shared libraries and three subdirectories. Thereafter, switch to the new directory and just start the video conference on the command line:
./alfaview > /dev/null
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| alfaview on rpm-basd Linux with virtual camera |
As you can see, it works - even with an OBS-based virtual camera.
Update (2020-10-21): After a recent system update I had trouble with the audio. I had to install the package alsa-plugins-pulseaudio and alfaview worked again.
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