Yesterday I stumbled upon a post about free whatsapp softwares. So I thought I give it a try. After some initial troubles and a lot of startpaging I finally got it running.

Step 1: Registration

If you already have whatsapp installed on a phone you can extract the password from there. The web will tell you how…

I didn’t have whatsapp installed so I had to register. My choice was installing yowsup. But the problem is that packaged versions don’t work anymore. So I had to download and install the latest version.

Since I got an SSL error I had to patch the file yowsup/common/http/warequest.py. On line 5 I added:
import ssl

And on line 161 I changed

conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection(host ,port)

to:

conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection(host, port, context=ssl._create_unverified_context())

To be able to complete the install I had to install the packages python-dev and libncurses5-dev. Then to install I ran the following commandline as root:

python setup.py install

Now the registration can be done. First a code has to be requested. MCC and MNC can be found here, CC is the normal country code:

yowsup-cli registration --requestcode sms --phone 919890959141 --cc 91 --mcc 404 --mnc 45

After the SMS with the code has been received the registration can be finalized:

yowsup-cli registration --register 734-186 --phone 919890959141 --cc 91

This command will spit out a few lines of text. The only interesting information is the line starting with pw:, this is the password. Now create the configfile ~/.yowsup/auth for yowsup:

cc=91
phone=919890959141
id=
password=KJs4DyAfjIFg8AeLof=

Now yowsup can also be used to send and receive messages.

Step 2: Client Configuration

I chose to give pidgin and a try. Pidgin is available as package. I had to compile download whatsapp-purple and compile it. Just unzip, then run (or ARCH=i686):

make ARCH=x86_64

Followed by (as root):

make install

Now startup pidgin and add the new whatsapp account.

Happy messaging!