How I installed the Google Voice and Video Plugin on Fedora 15

For reasons I'll go into detail in another post, I'm now running Fedora 15 on my Sony Vaio laptop. With the launch of Google+, I wanted to use the hangout feature, which requires you to install the Google Voice and Video Plugin. Downloading the 64-bit rpm was easy enough, but when using rpm -i google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm to install showed a huge number unmet dependencies. But more annoyingly, rpm leaves it to you to figure out how to install each one of them.

It took me a while to find a way to sort this out (this post was the key) and it's quite easy to do. Here are the simple instructions:

1. Download the rpm of the Google T for 32-bit or 64-bit as appropriate. You'll get the download link as you start to try to use the hangout feature of Google+;
2. Download and install the Google public key:
   wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
rpm --import linux_signing_key.pub;
3. Navigate in the terminal to the directory where you've downloaded the rpm and use yum to install instead of rpm:
   cd ~/Downloads
yum localinstall google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm.

If it works for you in the way it did for me, yum will sort out the dependencies for you and ask you to confirm before installing.

Best of luck!