Using AppImages in Puppy...

[fredx181]

Hi Mike,

I tried your Teamviewer appimage, but unfortunately it didn't work for me, got error message that /opt/teamviewer/teamviewer doesn't exist.
Could it be that you have already Teamviewer installed on the OS you tested the appimage ?
In that case it's not a good test, because the teamviewer script in <appdir-root>/usr/bin looks for absolute paths, to fix that I have put $LAUNCHDIR in front of the paths, so becomes:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LAUNCHDIR/opt/teamviewer/tv_bin/wine/lib"
cd $LAUNCHDIR/opt/teamviewer
./teamviewer

sleep 5
pkill -9 teamviewer

exit 0

(the LAUNCHDIR variable (= <appdir-root>) is exported from the AppRun script)

Repacked as appimage, but then the next problem appeared:
Teamviewer wants to put logfiles in opt/teamviewer, but cannot because it's read-only system (mountpoint in /tmp) resulting that it won't start.
Also it needs to chmod some directories, so creating a working appimage for Teamviewer is out of the question IMO (unless you'd do a lot of tweaking), but self-extracting script does work because it's extracted so it's read/write.
Here's the selfextracting script: teamviewer12-portable
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/4qh ... table?dl=1

You probably can see now that it's absolutely not a straightforward thing to create portable appimages

Fred

[Mike Walsh]

@ Fred:-

Mm-hm. I think I did jump the gun a bit with TeamViewer. I've just tried it out with pristine boots, pfix=ram, of both Slacko 570 and Precise 571. I get the same problem, too.

The problem with TeamViewer, of course, is that it seems to want to write odd bits of information all over the place. It's probably why I've never found an AppImage of it anywhere; like you say, it's going to want a lot of tweaking.

QIV & Smokey's BackSeatDriver, however, both behave themselves; those I did extensively test out with 'clean' Puppies, and although I needed to add a fair few libs for the 'older Pups' version of BSD, that's all it was. And an AppImage is a perfect way to use BackSeatDriver, I think....plus, it's a hell of a lot smaller than TeamViewer, anyway. Personally, I prefer it.

---------------------------------------------

One other I did put together, although I haven't decided whether to publish it, was an AppImage of GuvcView 1.5.3, with all necessary libs for it to work. I originally assembled it for Slacko 560/570, for my own use. When I was testing the AppImage of BackSeatDriver in a pristine copy of rerwin's Lucid 5287 'Sulu 002', I fired it up, just for the hell of it.....and was gobsmacked that it ran, and worked properly, too.

Probably inspired by the fact that I finally got my hands on a Logitech c920 HD Pro last year. I'd been eyeing it up for years, but at over GBP £100 it was way out of my price range. PC World, here in the UK, had it down to just under £40 last summer in their August Bank Holiday sale.....so I grabbed one! I'm interested in any and all webcam apps I can find.....as well as every possible method you can think of for packaging and running 'em.

--------------------------------------------

I may try TV as a self-extracting script.....and see what it does. Thanks for the 'heads-up'.

EDIT:- I've withdrawn the TeamViewer AppImage above; although it fires up, it doesn't in fact do what it's meant to. I've learnt from that one..!

If anyone really wants a 'portable', take-anywhere version of TeamViewer 12, use Fred's self-extracter in the post above. That one definitely works.


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

Afternoon, boys & girls.

Some more AppImages for you; again, these are all 32-bit:-

a) An AppImage of Patriot's Avidemux 2.5.2 'all-in-one'. This one gives you the option of either GTK or Qt interfaces. Runs anywhere.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14pHMsu ... sp=sharing

-----------------------------------

b) An AppImage of the GuvcView-1.5.3 webcam viewer. This is one I originally made up for the 5-series Slackos from an Ubuntu package; it contains all necessary libs - over & above the bog standard stuff you'll find in any distro. It seems happy to run in most Pups I've tried it in.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BSl9Er ... sp=sharing

Also, one of the GuvcView-1.5.0 package specifically for Wary/Racy:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yQK6xZ ... sp=sharing

--------------------------------------

c) And here's XVidCap-1.1.7, the rather quirky screen-capture app. This one's packed as a self-extracting script, rather than an AppImage; if packed as the latter, upon trying to record you get

Code: Select all

Error : Read-only filesystem

But if packaged as the former, the problem doesn't exist. Great fun to play around with, though.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xPKRhV ... sp=sharing

No doubt there will be more to follow.....


Mike.

[fredx181]

Hi All, here's Appimage for Spotify 32-bit

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ehy ... otify?dl=1
Make executable and just run it, should work on most modern Puppies (I tested on tahr, stretch, xenial, slacko).
But it's BIG (108 MB)

I used the Spotify recipe from here, but changed amd64 to i386 inside the .yml file
https://github.com/AppImage/pkg2appimag ... er/recipes

If you don't have premium there are ways to block ads by putting a list of url's in /etc/hosts (can be found on the web)
But it has some disadvantages, PM me for info or if you have trouble setting this up.

TIP:
By creating a folder "Spotify.config" in the same location as the "Spotify" appimage, your login credentials will be saved in there, instead of ~/.config/spotify
So, if you run Spotify from some partition e.g. sda3 then it will autologin from every Puppy you run.

Enjoy !

Fred

[Mike Walsh]

Morning, kiddiwinks.

In response to a plea on the Forum from new member frenchtoast yesterday

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=115799

....for an up-to-date version of Pencil2D (a drawing/animation program), I've found this, too, is available as an AppImage.

The project's web-site is here:-

https://www.pencil2d.org/

....and the Downloads page is here:-

https://www.pencil2d.org/download/

There's repo instructions for many Linux distros, but the AppImage packages are at the right-hand side, top of the page. There's 32- and 64-bit both available, and the 32-bit package, from testing so far, runs OK in Tahr 606 and Slacko 560. (Which means it should run in Micko's 'classic' 570, Sailor's 571, and probably Mikeslr's 572, as well.)

As with all AppImages, these need execute permissions setting (easiest is to Rt-clk->'Properties', tick all three 'Execute' checkboxes, hit 'Refresh', then 'OK' and exit.) The AppImage can go anywhere you like, since they unpack into /tmp for the duration, and run from there.

Click on the AppImage 'cogwheel', and after a few seconds, this is what you'll get:-





Experiment, and.....enjoy. I've got another new 'toy' to play with. Nice one!


Mike.

[don570]

I extracted the appimage and made a fatdog64 package
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 93#1024293
____________________________________________________

[Mike Walsh]

Hallo again, boys & girls.

Now then; a couple of items for you tonight. The first one's quite an interesting one. It's a website link I picked up on OMG!Ubuntu!, and it's a kind of 'one-stop-shop' for all types of cross-distro packages; Snaps, FlatPaks, AppImages, and the like.

https://linuxappstore.io/

There's tons of apps listed here, and each one tells you exactly what types of package format it's available in, what architecture, where to obtain them, and links for the same. It's rather useful, to say the least.

Annnd.....

---------------------------------------------

.....on said site, I came across a rather nifty, basic media player, called MoonPlayer.

https://appimage.github.io/MoonPlayer/

It's an AppImage (64-bit only, I'm afraid), but it fires straight up in Xenialpup64 7.5 without a murmur. As usual, it takes a few seconds to unpack itself into /tmp, so just be patient. You can see on the linked page what it looks like.

Although it's Qt5-based, this one's been done properly; no hunting around to find external, system-installed versions of Qt5. It truly is self-contained.

On first run, it'll tell you no plugins have been found, and ask you if you want to install them. If you click on 'OK', it'll then proceed to install 'em for you.....telling you what's happening while it does so. Neat!

The download dialog box doesn't self-close when finished, and, curiously, doesn't tell you it's finished. However, give it about a minute after the text quits scrolling in the window, then close it. You'll then see another window telling you all items have been installed..... It's the only slight cock-up in the procedure, but we can live with that.

Selecting files to play is also slightly different. Click the hamburger symbol, far right end of the player 'toolbar' (this is rather like jlst's MPV packages, where the onscreen GUI comes and goes according to cursor movement). This will bring up a 'playlist' window, where you can add up to three items to watch one after another. After adding the first one, it starts to play automatically; pause if you want to while adding the remaining items. In fact, it starts playing every item as soon as you've added it, so the procedure takes a little bit of getting used to.

However, I'm willing to overlook these wee 'quirks' (and what's Puppy without 'quirks', after all..? ), since it's the only media-player AppImage I've so far found which does 'exactly what it says on the tin'.

And you can't ask for more than that; download it, make it executable, and click to play.....from anywhere you care to put it. Simple, and straight-forward, which is the whole premise behind AppImages, after all. (Mine's running from my remote 'shared' data partition, started by its own, dedicated Menu entry.)

Enjoy.


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

Update for y'all.

Courtesy of BleepingComputer's Linux & Unix forum moderater NickAu (also a forum member here), the new version of Pencil2D is now available, again in AppImage format.

Direct download links:-

Pencil2D-0.6.4 32-bit:- https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/rele ... 4.AppImage

Pencil2D-0.6.4 64-bit:- https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/rele ... 4.AppImage

Enjoy.


Mike.

[mikeslr]

While hunting for slightly older music-creation AppImages --the latest seemed to have been built for Buster/Dingo requiring qt5 libraries newer than easily available for Stretch/Bionic-- I stumbled upon an OpenSUSE repo, https://download.opensuse.org/repositor ... /AppImage/ whose version of synthv1 with builtin glibc that appears to run OOTB under BionicPup64 and (perhaps depending on previously installed Qt5 libraries) Xenialpup64. Appears -- I was searching for someone else. The application opened and seemed responsive. I don't know anything about creating music so could not test further.

The point of general interest is that when AppImages first appeared there were only three distros they were tested under. The Icons here suggest that has now grown to 7 major Linux Distros. https://appimage.org/ A little searching may now reveal an AppImage of the application you want in what formerly might have been considered strange places.

[watchdog]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cvZxJN ... sp=sharing

I used create-portable by fredx181 and original sfs for disco dingo. It requires glibc>=2.28. It works in ScPup and Upupee.

[watchdog]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/128EuUU ... sp=sharing

The version "chroot" of the above build.

[watchdog]

I am not able to replicate the exploit of a portable vlc x86_64. In ScPup64 I can't use the h264 codec. It's a nightmare. I have an experimental build based on buster64: it starts but won't play mp4 videos.

[watchdog]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_LCp0a ... sp=sharing

Do not ask to me how I have done it. It works in buster64 and ScPup64. Glibc >= 2.28 required. Original libraries from buster64. Follow chroot version.

[watchdog]

The version "chroot" of the above build obtained with create-portable by fredx181.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sH2p7v ... sp=sharing

Remember to make executable the downloaded apps. Just click on them.

[watchdog]

Based on stretch and created with create-portable32 by fredx181, it works for me in recent 32 bit puppies.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tYYQBH ... sp=sharing

[mikeslr]

https://keepassxc.org/download/#linux

[watchdog]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g03pjE ... sp=sharing

It works in eoan ermine.

[Mike Walsh]

Bloody hell, watchdog; amazing stuff.

Keep 'em coming, buddy.....


Mike.

[hatemonday]

AppimageHub :

Unlike other applications, AppImages do not need to be installed before they can be used. However, they need to be marked as executable before they can be run. This is a Linux security feature.

Many linux apps are now distributed as appimages. Any security concern about appimages ? Do they contain malicious code /binaries /spyware ?

.

[Mike Walsh]

@ hatemonday:-

I appreciate that you're one of those Puppians who are extremely concerned about security in general. About the only reference I've been able to find to security issues with AppImages is this thread on Github:-

https://github.com/AppImage/pkg2appimage/issues/197

.....and it appears to be more about possible 'attacks' at the far end - the repositories where you actually download them from. About which we, the 'users', can do absolutely nothing.

Draw your own conclusions.


Mike.