kakaotalk-env

Configuration Environment for KakaoTalk [1] and its wrapper script to start and quit the Kakao Talk in the Debian / Ubuntu Linux.

Backgroud

I am weak to type many words with the small phone, and it turns out so many typos in messages. Since Kakao doesn't support the KakaoTalk Desktop for Linux distribution, so I just tried to install it through Wine. This repository was turned out my struggle while doing so. I hope that Kakao should support their application for Linux architecture more and more. I am pretty sure that the company has a lot of benefits from Linux community.

Preparation

Wine 6 is required! If one doesn't have Wine 6, please check the latest Wine site how to upgrade to 6 in terms of your OS.

• Install Wine with root

dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update && apt-get install wine wine32 winbind fonts-nanum fonts-nanum-coding fonts-nanum-eco fonts-nanum-extra make

or

If one has already make, one can use the following commands

make pkgs

Note that with the default Debian installation, ${USER} doesn't belong to sudo group. One should add the relevant user account to system sudo group.

usermod -aG sudo ${USER}

Of course, one should logout and login in, then be back to this console.

• Configure Wine first. And choose Window 10. (It doesn't matter actually.)

winecfg

Build

$ make get
........
KakaoTalk_Setup.exe        100%[==================>]  52.46M  17.0MB/s    in 3.7s
2020-08-08 22:39:49 (14.3 MB/s) - ‘KakaoTalk_Setup.exe’ saved [55013760/55013760]

$ make conf
>>> Updating /home/jhlee/.wine/system.reg with NanumGothic

$ make install

One should see the following screenshots for further configuration.

Follow Screenshots

Figure 0.0

Make sure you select 한국어 instead of English at this step. Otherwise Korean fonts won't work, even with NanumGothic or NanumBarunGothic fix shown later.

Figure 0.1

Figure 0.2

Figure 0.3

Figure 1

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6 One can see the Setting icon in the left-bottom area. The broken menu order is 설정, 잠금모드, 로그아웃, 종료.

Figure 7 Font Selection Menu.

Figure 8

Figure 9 After restarting it, the Korean fonts are shown clearly.

make get

Download KakaoTalk_Setup.exe from [2].

make conf

This rule make the basic Korean font setup for KakaoTalk by editing $HOME/.wine/system.reg. The default font I've tested is NanumGothic. If one would like to test other fonts, please check DEFAULT_FONT in configure/CONFIG file.

make conf.show

This rule shows what two defintions are in $HOME/.wine/system.reg.

$ make conf.show
 88261  "MS Shell Dlg"="NanumGothic"
 88262  "MS Shell Dlg 2"="NanumGothic"

make install

Install KakaoTalk.

• Login with Kakao account

With the kakaotalk.bash, one can register this application with the Kakao-Talk. And it may start and kill few times.

make uninstall

Uninstall the installed Kakaotalk through kakaotalk.bash.

Upgrade

The automatic update doesn't work. However, we can install it again from scratch. If there is a running KakaoTalk, this rule will stop it.

make upgrade

If one has the exist KakaoTalk_Setup.exe file locally, the rule triggers an additional rule make backup. This backup rule renames the exist installation file with an extracted version number suffix, for example, KakaoTalk_Setup.exe_v3.1.6.2572. If the same version file exists, it will overwrite it. In case, the latest version doesn't work, use this backup file to recover it.

Command line Commands

Usually, Mate Desktop one can find the Kakao icon in `Applicatons / Wine / Programs / Kakao Talk. However, sometime, the command line is useful.

• Start it

bash kakaotalk.bash start

or

make start

• Stop it

bash kakaotalk.bash stop

or

make stop

Ubuntu 20.04

• There is no NanumGothic, but one can select NanumBarunGothic in setting of KakaoTalk.

Figure 11 Kakao Talk Setting.

• ufw is the default active stage, but disable. I tested with both disable and enable (with gufw) with the default ufw firewald configuration. Both case work fine.

Doesn't work

In case, this repository doesn't work for anyone. One may try the method with PlayOnLinux shown in https://github.com/kimlulz/Katalk_linux.

More Screenshots

Figure 12 Kakao Talk Setting.

Figure 13 Kakao Talk Setting Information.

Figure 14 Kakao Talk and Debian System Information.

Korean Input System

I don't use the Korean Locale, because it makes me so many troubles to build programs since my First SUSE / Redhat Linux. Now it is much better than before. But I don't need to use them also. I delightly use ibus-hangul, it is easy to setup, and work very well [3]. Here is my locale information if anyone have some difficulties.

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Errors and Warnings

• With the latest KakaoTalk, I saw an issue on Debian 10. If one cannot run the KakaoTalk, please see docs/Debian10.md.

References

[1] https://www.kakaocorp.com/service/KakaoTalk?lang=en

[2] https://downloadkakaotalk.com/kakao-talk-for-windows.html

[3] https://github.com/libhangul/ibus-hangul