Hello Linux Geeksters.
WhatsApp is a popular chat application for mobile devices. With WhatsApp, users create groups and chat each other from their phone for free, or for an less than one euro anual subscription. As you already know, the app works only on mobile devices (for now).
There are two work arounds for using WhatsApp on Linux and other operating systems (and others as well).
One is to use Whosthere, an open source application developed by Canonical, in order to be used on the Ubuntu phones, until WhatsApp gets suport for Linux. Read more about Whosthere and how to install it here.
The second workaround is to install an Android version on a Virtualbox virtual machine and use WhatsApp.
Some developers from Intel created a version of Android X86 with Whatsapp pre-installed, to bring the chat application to Linux, Windows and Mac OS X through Virtualbox. They have also made some corrections in order to make Android X86 work properly on Virtualbox.
To use Android X86 with Whatsapp, you need to have Virtualbox installed. Click here to get some tutorials of how to install Virtualbox on your Linux System, or go to the virtualbox site, download Virtualbox for your Linux and install it by hand.
Next, download Android X86 with Whatsapp from here. (I hope this does not get removed soon – from lffl.org)
Once downloaded, start VirtualBox, go to File -> Add and choose Android_4.1.1_WhatsApp.ova. Start WhatsApp and enter your mobile phone associated with your Whatsapp account.
There are other Android virtual machines already created, If you want to toy around and test applications from Google Play, see this article.