Encrypted Chat Wire
Wire is an open source and encrypted messaging service. This is available to install on Ubuntu (and related distributions) through a secure repository.
The team that develops this application assures in a blog post that “you can [install and] receive updates from Wire through the update mechanism of its own package management system. Updates are automatic and more secure when we sign the repositories with a PGP key «.
In previous versions of this application for Linux they were only available on the application site. If you wanted updates, you had to install them manually, this being a problem for many users without sufficient knowledge.
Wire offers fully encrypted chats, voice calls, video and group chats with end-to-end encryption. Anyone can take a look at the code at GitHub to check what is being done with this application, as well as report problems encountered and contribute code.
Launching the Linux client late last year, the folks behind this project have said that "while many other platforms have neglected Linux, we look to this community of savvy consumers as a great asset to our product."
Install Wire in Ubuntu via APT
If you have already tried Wire in previous versions and it is already installed on your system, you must remove it before adding the repository (nothing catastrophic will happen if you do not do it, but if you don't, you will have two applications installed, which will not be very Useful).
Wire for Linux beta is currently available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or later versions. Supports 32-bit and 64-bit distributions.
To add the repository and the PGP key, just open the terminal and execute the commands detailed below.
Let's start installing:
- The first thing we will do is install apt-transport-https to search for packages through HTTPS with the following command:
sudo apt install apt-transport-https
- Next we are going to import the PGP signing key to verify the installed packages:
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://wire-app.wire.com/linux/releases.key
- Now we are going to add the application repository to our list of repositories:
echo "deb https://wire-app.wire.com/linux/debian stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wire-desktop.list
- Finally, we only have to update the list of available Ubuntu packages and install this encrypted messaging client. For this we will use the following combination:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install wire-desktop
This app is still a beta so you should expect mistakes, but it is interesting to keep track of them. If you decide to give it a try be sure to post comments and report issues on the project's GitHub page.