We adopted Teams-for-Linux as our preferred video conferencing application,
because we couldn't find any alternative (e.g. Zoom) that would work acceptably
on Raspberry Pi. Running Zoom under Box86 on the Pi is not viable, despite
what you may have read/seen on the Internet.
We only built Teams from source for 32-bit x86 (i386). For armhf and amd64,
we used the prebuilt debs from the GitHub home page
(https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).
electron-builder creates debs with rather inaccurate dependencies. We
hand-edited the debs to demote libnotify4 and libappindicator3-1 from "Depends"
to "Recommends", which is more accurate and allowed us to install the app
without appindicator support, which was not useful for our very minimal
XFCE-based desktop and caused problems for Citrix Workspace App.
Teams-for-Linux was meant to be built using yarn (apt-get install yarnpkg)
rather than npm. I really don't know anything about either, so I naively
used npm instead. Something like:
sudo npm install -g electron-builder
npm install
electron-builder --ia32 -l deb # output deb will be in "dist" directory
npm run-script dist:linux:deb might have worked except that "--ia32" wasn't
included, and the latest version of electron-builder requires that the arch
flags precede "-l", so the syntax is wrong in any case. Edit of package.json
required to fix both.
npm will grab binary builds of Electron from Github that may be at a higher
libc/glib level than Jessie can support. We were forced to upgrade glibc on
TLXOS RPi/RePC/NUC32 4.8.x to Buster levels in order to allow Teams-for-Linux
to run, because recompiling Electron on Jessie was just too nightmarish to
even contemplate.
When compiling for arm, you may run afoul of a bug whereby electron-builder
attempts to install and use an x86_64 version of fpm. The workaround is to
install fpm using "gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc fpm -v 1.9.3" (requires ruby)
and then "export USE_SYSTEM_FPM=true" before running electron-builder. Fpm
requires ruby >= 2.3, and building and installing that on Jessie is a real
struggle. fpm > 1.9.3 will create faulty debs where the control archive has
the name control.tar.gz but is in XZ format.