Call for SER Player Linux AppImage testers

[cgarry]

In an effort to produce Linux releases for more than just Debian based distributions, I have been working on a 64-bit AppImage that should run on most 64-bit Linux desktop distributions.  I am new to AppImage packages and what I am hoping is that Linux users out there to try this file on their various installations so that I can get an idea of how well this works.

SER Player AppImage:
https://github.com/cgarry/ser-player/releases/download/v1.5.2/ser-player-1.5.2.glibc2.4-x86_64.AppImage (23.7MB)

SER Files for testing:
https://github.com/cgarry/ser-player/releases/download/v1.4.0/Jup_200415_204534_R_F0001-0300.zip (16MB)
https://github.com/cgarry/ser-player/releases/download/v1.4.0/Mars_150414_002445_OSC_F0001-0500.zip (11.7MB)

To use the AppImage just download it, change the permissions to make it executable and the double-click it to run it.
More details about Linux AppImages can be found here: http://appimage.org/

Cheers,
Chris

[Gina]

That's very interesting

[cgarry]

There are a few of these cross-distribution package formats around now (AppImage, FlatPak, Snap...).  From my point of view as an App developer they are brilliant, I can deploy my niche app for Linux without having to worry about learning multiple package formats and building a ridiculous number of binaries for each release.

If the app proves to be very popular then the various distro package maintainers can always pick it up from GitHub and create an official package.

That is the theory anyway, assuming it actually works as advertised for end users.

Cheers,
Chris

[uhb1966]

I think i have a SUSE image somewhere, can dig it out if that helps? Is there a Mac version, could test that too

 

[cgarry]

11 minutes ago, uhb1966 said:

 

I think i have a SUSE image somewhere, can dig it out if that helps? Is there a Mac version, could test that too

 

That would save me from creating yet another virtual machine, so yes please!  There is a Mac version, the download link is on the main SER Player web page: https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/ser-player

Cheers,
Chris

[GreatAttractor]

Worked fine for me, just a few harmless messages in the console window:

/tmp/.mount_PssU8e
/tmp/.mount_PssU8e/usr/bin/ser-player.wrapper
/tmp/.mount_PssU8e/ser-player.desktop

(zenity:18084): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme directory base/ of theme oxygen has no size field

Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile

I'm on Fedora 23 x64:

Linux localhost.localdomain 4.5.7-202.fc23.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 28 18:22:51 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

[JamesF]

I will give AppImage a go for oacapture too as it's proving something of a pain to create so many binaries for Linux.  Just keeping the virtual machines up-to-date for building and testing is quite time-consuming.

James

[JamesF]

Oh, it also looks as though it might work more nicely when there are libraries I want to use that also exist on the system but with a different (and potentially incompatible) version.

James

[cgarry]

3 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I will give AppImage a go for oacapture too as it's proving something of a pain to create so many binaries for Linux.  Just keeping the virtual machines up-to-date for building and testing is quite time-consuming.

James

It is definitely worth giving AppImages a try.  Most of the work in creating the AppImage for SER Player was done Simon Peter who took a .deb that I produced on Debian oldstable and produced a custom AppImage recipe script for me.  I am very grateful for this as it would have taken so much longer without his help!

Thanks for trying that @GreatAttractor, good to know that it worked.

Cheers,
Chris

[JamesF]

I've been trying to get my head around this of late, partly to side-step the problems of building a version of oacapture for recent Fedora releases.

Irritatingly I've come across a niggly little problem:  it all gets a bit messy if your application includes server configuration stuff, such as udev rules for loading firmware into cameras, or in the case of some TIS cameras, forcing an existing driver to recognise a camera that it doesn't already handle even when it can.

Not sure how I'm going to work around that one yet...

James

[GreatAttractor]

James, perhaps a runtime-configurable selection of what camera APIs the user needs? E.g. for PGR cameras,  oacapture could assume that FlyCapture libs and udev rules are already in place.

[cgarry]

Hi James,

Have you asked Simon Peter about these issues?  He may well have come across this before.

Cheers,
Chris

[JamesF]

It's worth a try, certainly.

James

[vincent-FA]

It works on Arch Linux, with the same warnings on launch as reported by GreatAttractor plus this one:

zenity, kdialog, Xdialog missing. Skipping ./bin//ser-player.wrapper.

and many of these:

XmbTextListToTextProperty result code -2

 

[cgarry]

Thanks for the feedback Vincent.

I have now released v1.6.0 of SER Player with 64-bit and 32-bit AppImages supplied for Linux as well as the usual Windows and OS X versions.  I have tested these in VMs running Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, Manjaro, Solus  and a couple others that I cannot remember off the top of my head.

Apart from the warnings mentioned, the AppImages ran perfectly on all of these so I have to say that I am very impressed with the AppImage format.

Cheers,
Chris