Installing Google Talk plugin in Gentoo linux

Google provides Google Talk plugin as rpm or deb packages for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. To get it on Gentoo when you try

emerge -pv google-talkplugin

you can see that it is masked by license. It means you have to accept the license before installing. You can find all licenses at /usr/portage/licenses. To get a specific license try

ls /usr/portage/licenses | grep google

You can read the license and if you accept it then add a line to /etc/portage/package.license to reflect it. In this case, the line would be

www-plugins/google-talkplugin google-talkplugin

and in general it is:

<full package name> <license name>

Now when you try emerging it you get a message saying that the license does not allow mirroring. This is why the fetch restriction is in place. The message also tells you to download the .deb package suitable to your architecture and put it in /usr/portage/distfiles. The problem is Google provides you current version and not the version considered stable by Gentoo. Moreover, the version 1.8 which is considered stable by Gentoo is not available according a Gentoo bug [I wish I had found that out earlier].

So the 1.8 version ebuild is for those who have a copy of the older Google Talk plugin. All others have to unmask the newer version according to their architectures. I had to add the following line to /etc/portage/package.keywords.

=www-plugins/google-talkplugin-2.1.6.0 ~amd64

Now portage can fetch it for you. However, if you have already downloaded latest version of the plugin then you can use the command as root to copy it to you distfiles folder and portage will not have any checksum error either if the versions have not changed.

cp -v Downloads/google-talkplugin_current_amd64.deb /usr/portage/distfiles/google-talkplugin_2.1.6.0-1_amd64.deb

Now portage will not have to redownload the package.