Create Portable Packages With AppImage DistroTube
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Date: 2022-03-30
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Comments and reviews: 10
Kevin
Yeah, it's simple for single stand alone binaries. I've spent a couple of days trying to create an appimage of a program I had to build from source, along with several libraries I also had to build from source due to different (newer) versions of them than available in the current repositories.
ldd shows me that the program is dependent on 147 other files. The appimage tool with the --generate flag is supposed to figure all of that out for you, but it crashes.
So now I'm looking for tutorials that explain including all of the libraries the program also needs.
How about a follow up tutorial that goes deeper down the rabbit hole and clarifies such a scenario?
BTW, thanks for this one, it helped.
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Yeah, it's simple for single stand alone binaries. I've spent a couple of days trying to create an appimage of a program I had to build from source, along with several libraries I also had to build from source due to different (newer) versions of them than available in the current repositories.
ldd shows me that the program is dependent on 147 other files. The appimage tool with the --generate flag is supposed to figure all of that out for you, but it crashes.
So now I'm looking for tutorials that explain including all of the libraries the program also needs.
How about a follow up tutorial that goes deeper down the rabbit hole and clarifies such a scenario?
BTW, thanks for this one, it helped.
reply
Concerned
Good video DT. If you, or anyone else here, is interested in seeing an AppImage in action, I have an open source project which uses them. It's called fractorium (dot com) and the project is hosted on bitbucket. We had to use it in a somewhat non-standard way: it needed to be a self contained executable like you demonstrated, but also needed to perform some install steps to place config files on the system. It also had to be able to run several command line programs contained within, which accept command line arguments. If you look at how we did it, you can see that we were able to accomplish all of this using AppImage.
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Good video DT. If you, or anyone else here, is interested in seeing an AppImage in action, I have an open source project which uses them. It's called fractorium (dot com) and the project is hosted on bitbucket. We had to use it in a somewhat non-standard way: it needed to be a self contained executable like you demonstrated, but also needed to perform some install steps to place config files on the system. It also had to be able to run several command line programs contained within, which accept command line arguments. If you look at how we did it, you can see that we were able to accomplish all of this using AppImage.
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Ярослав
Appimage is basically an archive with all the dependencies and a script to execute. The only noticeable differences from other packaging formats are that it is executable on its own and is self-contained with no dependencies to cause a dependency hell. The problem I see is that it is as safe as random .exe files from the internet in windows. And we obviously don't want 3 electron apps to take 3 instances of electron worth of space on a disk. Now if we want to wrap a binary with a bunch of docs/images, then it is indeed better to use an appimage.
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Appimage is basically an archive with all the dependencies and a script to execute. The only noticeable differences from other packaging formats are that it is executable on its own and is self-contained with no dependencies to cause a dependency hell. The problem I see is that it is as safe as random .exe files from the internet in windows. And we obviously don't want 3 electron apps to take 3 instances of electron worth of space on a disk. Now if we want to wrap a binary with a bunch of docs/images, then it is indeed better to use an appimage.
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Mazhar
I think the best reason to use AppImages is to isolate manually compiled Apps from the system.
Just think about it. When you build an App manually and then install it with 'cmake install' or something, it gets mixed up with the system files. You can install that app to a temporary directory with 'cmake install destdir=temp.AppDir prefix=/usr' or something, then package that directory as an AppImage, and then use that AppImage without having to ever mess with your system.
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I think the best reason to use AppImages is to isolate manually compiled Apps from the system.
Just think about it. When you build an App manually and then install it with 'cmake install' or something, it gets mixed up with the system files. You can install that app to a temporary directory with 'cmake install destdir=temp.AppDir prefix=/usr' or something, then package that directory as an AppImage, and then use that AppImage without having to ever mess with your system.
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Source
AppImage is nice if You want to distribute Your application for what-ever distro. But it takes a lot of disk space:
I kind of made my first -AppImage- on windows when I tested wxWidgets. Statically linked -Hello World- binary was 100MB in size. I'll bet it's same on Linux...
Reminds me about Autodesk apps.... they take ten minute to start. Maybe they have -appimaged- their own OS in? Still they refuse to make their apps for Linux.
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AppImage is nice if You want to distribute Your application for what-ever distro. But it takes a lot of disk space:
I kind of made my first -AppImage- on windows when I tested wxWidgets. Statically linked -Hello World- binary was 100MB in size. I'll bet it's same on Linux...
Reminds me about Autodesk apps.... they take ten minute to start. Maybe they have -appimaged- their own OS in? Still they refuse to make their apps for Linux.
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masterninjason
When I first got into Linux, I found appimages pretty quick, and thought it was super cool and simple, and wondered why everything can't be an appimage, I then realized how easy it is to manage stuff with a package manager (I was still new to pretty much everything) and so didn't think about it too much anymore... Now that I see how easy they are to actually make, I'm starting to wonder again...
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When I first got into Linux, I found appimages pretty quick, and thought it was super cool and simple, and wondered why everything can't be an appimage, I then realized how easy it is to manage stuff with a package manager (I was still new to pretty much everything) and so didn't think about it too much anymore... Now that I see how easy they are to actually make, I'm starting to wonder again...
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Simon
There are appimages of Emacs - that much Said If anyone would package Emacs do Something useable Like package Emacs 28 with native compilation and gtk3 as available through some Feature Branchen Form Savannah ... Or some Others interessting Branches ... In the end regular Emacs ist available prettie much everywhere ... But Special Emacs Versions dir testing ... Would bei fun
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There are appimages of Emacs - that much Said If anyone would package Emacs do Something useable Like package Emacs 28 with native compilation and gtk3 as available through some Feature Branchen Form Savannah ... Or some Others interessting Branches ... In the end regular Emacs ist available prettie much everywhere ... But Special Emacs Versions dir testing ... Would bei fun
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Snagglebee
Thanks a bunch! I tried once to create an appimage however I only kept failing and it made things rediculously more difficult because I was getting errors I don't even understand anymore. I was following the guide on their wiki.
In the end I gave up and just went with flatpak because at least the wiki there worked for me....
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Thanks a bunch! I tried once to create an appimage however I only kept failing and it made things rediculously more difficult because I was getting errors I don't even understand anymore. I was following the guide on their wiki.
In the end I gave up and just went with flatpak because at least the wiki there worked for me....
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John
Hey DT
The origin is from when Ken Thompson and co originally wrote Unix.
/usr Was originally the User Directory, however they ran out of space on their machine, so they made /home
/usr now gets used almost like a -Program Files- directory on windows, however it was only ever supposed to be for user files
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Hey DT
The origin is from when Ken Thompson and co originally wrote Unix.
/usr Was originally the User Directory, however they ran out of space on their machine, so they made /home
/usr now gets used almost like a -Program Files- directory on windows, however it was only ever supposed to be for user files
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Photon89
Thanks for the good explanation! Any hint how I would go about packaging an app which requires a big number of dependencies? The app is in the AUR so it would be easy, if I could just install it and all its dependencies in a clean chroot using some AUR helper, but I couldn't find a way to do so, so far.
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Thanks for the good explanation! Any hint how I would go about packaging an app which requires a big number of dependencies? The app is in the AUR so it would be easy, if I could just install it and all its dependencies in a clean chroot using some AUR helper, but I couldn't find a way to do so, so far.
reply
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