Viber won’t start

Recently, I upgraded Viber (for Linux desktop) to version 18.2.0.2. However, it simply would not start, although dependencies were satisfied. Therefore, I searched for a fix.

Trying to run Viber from the terminal showed the following:

xkbcommon: ERROR: Couldn't process include statement for 'fi(phonetic)'
xkbcommon: ERROR: Abandoning symbols file "(unnamed)"
xkbcommon: ERROR: Failed to compile xkb_symbols
xkbcommon: ERROR: Failed to compile keymap
[11181:11209:1207/231654.663919:FATAL:xkb_keyboard_layout_engine.cc(640)] Keymap file failed to load: fi-phonetic
Trace/breakpoint trap

I am writing this on CRUX 3.7, but apparently the problem affects other distros, as well. I searched a bit and found the following discussion for Linux Mint.

So, it seems that Viber does not like it, if you have an “exotic” keyboard layout combination. In my case, I have Finnish and Bulgarian (phonetic) layouts. To make the program start, as suggested in this post, I needed to first execute this:

setxkbmap -variant ' ,phonetic'

Note the preceding space in ' ,phonetic'. I use Xfce, so I put the above command among the autostart applications.

Bleh…