Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

koulaxizis · Joined: 17 Jul 2011 Posts: 455 Location: Greece

Do you think it would be possible (or even practical/useful) to be able to use snap packages on Puppy?

Reference: https://snapcraft.io/

slavvo67 · Joined: 12 Oct 2012 Posts: 1625 Location: The other Mr. 305

It's good to see you back!

There are a lot of different types of packages, similar to snap packages. There's a decent appimage thread in the forum that you may want to check out, though I find some of the appimages don't work or are a bit older.

Quick answer, thought, is the more options, the better in my opinion. Barry Kauler has also been looking into the on package fits all scenario. You may want to read his blog, as well.

Good to see you.

Slavvo67

rockedge · Posted: Thu 26 Jul 2018, 14:59 Post subject:

I got Flatpak to work....installed GIMP 2.10 using it.

mikeslr · Posted: Thu 26 Jul 2018, 19:34 Post subject: Snap vs. flatpak vs AppImage

The following post provides, I think, the relative advantages and disadvantages of Snap vs. flatpak vs AppImage. https://askubuntu.com/questions/866511/what-are-the-differences-between-snaps-appimage-flatpak-and-others.

Draw your own conclusions. My take is that using them with Puppies as an alternative to SFSes, the advantage lies with AppImages. Indeed, we could even create and host them. Something to be considered if the devs who maintain aufs ever quit, and gyro's overlayfs becomes a necessity. [Or maybe I've misread the reason for overlayfs].

mikesLr

koulaxizis · Joined: 17 Jul 2011 Posts: 455 Location: Greece

@slavvo67 It's good to be back with you guys! Smile

mikeslr · Posted: Sun 12 Aug 2018, 13:33 Post subject:

Hi koulaxizis,

This is the beginning of the main AppImage thread, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=110078 on which you'll find links to repos. Someone --IIRC, rockedge-- provided information about how an AppImage was modified to include libraries that had not been built in but were required by his/her OS.

There's also tools and instructions, I think, on the main AppImage cite for making such changes.

One of the problems working with AppImages which don't run OOTB is that lld can't immediately be used. On one occasion, I shortened the name to make it easier to start via a terminal several times and while laboriously installing the libs it required and hadn't found on my system.

AppImages are great when they work. But frankly, building and using SFSes are easier. But that opinion might change if and when I've setup a Puppy to use the tools available for building and modifying AppImages.

I'm not inclined to do that before someone creates a 64-bit BionicPup. Ubuntu Bionic Beaver has Long Term Support thru 2023 --and "I'm getting to old for this". 64 rather than 32 as I suspect long before 2023 32-bit web-browsers will be few, far between, and unable to render many webpages.

mikesLr

Edit June 22, 2020: Drawn to this thread by peebee's post below. By now we do have both a 64-bit BionicPup; and tools and knowledge of how to work with AppImages. Snaps and Flatpaks currently remain 'black boxes' to most of us.

peebee · Posted: Fri 19 Jun 2020, 14:29 Post subject:

Snap packages are in fact just squashfs archives....

The main difficulty is working out how to download the correct snap for the app you are interested in - but it is possible....

Debian has stopped supplying Chromium executables in its repos and is now supplying them as snaps.

Today I managed to download the latest 32-bit Debian chromium snap, open it up, extract just the chromium directory, add a few bits and repackage as an sfs that seems to work on a selection of pups.

So this isn't using snaps as snaps but as providers of apps that can be repackaged without all the (unneeded) snap dependencies for use on puppy..... maybe not of any great general interest - but I might provide further details if it is.
The snap was 160MB, the sfs for Puppy was 70MB with pepperflash added.

mikeslr · Posted: Mon 22 Jun 2020, 19:05 Post subject: How to Extract?

Hi peebee,

I'd like to know how to decomprsess snap packages. I don't think it's longer than 10 days that I've run into two occasions where the applications I was interested in were not available except as a Snap or flatpak.

ozsouth · Joined: 01 Jan 2010 Posts: 854 Location: S.E Australia

Mike, according to this site https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/chromium-configurable-launch-flags/10278/15
just place the snap in an empty folder, cd into that folder & run
unsquashfs (snapname).snap

peebee · Posted: Tue 23 Jun 2020, 02:02 Post subject:

Yes - or just rename to .snap.sfs and then click on it - will mount and open in a separate directory.

But its getting the .snap to download in the first case that is the tricky bit as they're not designed to be easily downloaded....

chromium-beta84.0.4147.45.sfs has been made from snap

wiak · Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Posts: 2062 Location: not Bulgaria

I do it this way:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/560065/how-can-i-manually-download-a-snap-package-for-example-with-wget

or did...

Much easier though is just to install snapd on a system that makes it easy to do that. As it happens it only takes minutes to install snap onto WeeDogLinux Arch64. You userswitch to user weedog and simply follow the instructions given here:

https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snap-on-arch-linux

WeeDogLinux Arch64 has all the prerequisites (such as git installed by default) and the git repo cloned for snap is very small anyway (the download isn't but doesn't take more than a few minutes anyway even on my very rural slow broadband connection...

Then once you reboot and: sudo systemctl restart snapd (or if root user no sudo required) you can download any snap from the snap store you want and later muck about with it for trying to use in Puppy or wherever...

For example:

sudo snap download cherrytree

then rename the fetched cherrytree_22.snap to cherrytree_22.sfs and you have your sfs to play with.

Of course, if you don't want to ease the issue of downloading via snapd installed system, the curl followed by wget method described in that unix.stackexchange.com page is one way to go. Best to script that or make a user-friendly yad or gtkdialog GUI for that too (I'd suggest yad - since gtkdialog is going to die sooner or later).

The packagename.info file that the curl line downloads is one big annoying-to-read blob, though simply loading that in geany allows you to see the various https:// links for the .snap you can then use to wget -c https://package_whatever.snap or it can be filtered via sed/awk for example, though I've never bothered. The 'jq' program mentioned in that link, certainly makes the info file more readable (parses it) and jq is a tiny download (less than a couple of MB) on WeeDogLinux Arch 64 anyway.

wiak