Setup a TeamTalk Server on Linux

TeamTalk is a conferencing system which allows users to have high-quality audio/video conversations, text chat, transfer files, and share screens. It is especially popular among the blind due to its accessibility with screen readers and high audio quality.

This article will explain how to setup TeamTalk on Linux. The commands listed in this article are written for Debian 7 x64. You may adapt them to your distro.

Downloading the server

Go to the TeamTalk website and download the archive of the latest version of the application (at time of this writing, 5.1). The file can be downloaded using a tool on your Vultr instance such as wget or curl. You could also download it on another machine and transfer it to your instance. To download TeamTalk 5.1, run the following command:

wget http://bearware.dk/teamtalk/v5.1/teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64.tgz

Installing TeamTalk

Creating the TeamTalk user

Create a user for TeamTalk to use. Run the following command as the root user.

adduser --system --shell /bin/sh tt

Extracting the archive

Run the following commands to extract the archive to the proper location and set the proper permissions.

gunzip teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64.tgz
tar xf teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64.tar
cd teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64
mv server/* /home/tt/tt5
cd ..
rm -rf teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64
rm teamtalk-v5.1-debian7-x86_64.tar
cd /home/tt/tt5
chown tt tt5srv
chown -R tt /home/tt

Installing the init script

TeamTalk includes an init script for your convenience. To install it, run the following commands:

mv /home/tt/tt5/daemon-script/tt5server /etc/init.d
chmod +x /etc/init.d/tt5server

To make TeamTalk start automatically when your instance is restarted, run:

update-rc.d tt5server defaults

Building the initial configuration

To build the initial configuration of the server, run the following commands.

cd /home/tt/tt5
./tt5srv -wizard

A text-based wizard will launch; follow the prompts to build the configuration file. Then fix permissions by running:

chown tt tt5srv.xml

Starting the server

If you installed the init script, use the following command:

service tt5server start

Otherwise, run:

su -c "/home/tt/tt5/tt5srv -d" tt