Installing Eiffel Studio in Linux as a flatpak

[Catalin Toma]

Greetings!

I have been working on creating a flatpak of Eiffel Studio and I would like to share the results here. The attached archive contains the necessary files to install EiffelStudio as a flatpak. This was successfully tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. 

At the moment this only works locally, i.e. it is not currently on Flathub or any other such flatpak repository. 

To test this, one would need to first install flatpak and flatpak-builder. In Ubuntu, this would be done in the following way:

sudo apt-get install flatpak flatpak-builder

The freedesktop sdk and runtimes then need to be installed from Flathub, using the following:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub \
  https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install flathub \
  org.freedesktop.Platform//23.08 \
  org.freedesktop.Sdk//23.08

The archive would then need to be decompressed, and in the eiffelstudio-flatpak folder, one would need to run the following command in a terminal:

flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean \
  build-dir org.eiffel.EiffelStudio.yml

Eiffel Studio should now appear in the main menu, with an icon. Clicking on the icon should start Eiffel Studio. This works in Gnome, but should also work in other desktop environments.

This method should provide a distribution-independent way of installing Eiffel Studio on Linux systems. A possible next step could be to provide users a way to install Eiffel Studio from a repository such as Flathub. For this, it would probably be necessary for the Eiffel Studio team to get in touch with the team that manages Flathub. Alternatively, a flatpak source could be created and provided via the Eiffel Studio website, with no connection to Flathub. 

I hope this helps. 

[Liberty Lover]

For those like me who had a hard time framing this in simplified terms:

● What Catalin Is Announcing (Plain English)

  The Problem He Solved:
  Installing EiffelStudio on Linux is a pain because different Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.) have different
  package formats and dependencies. What works on Ubuntu might not work on Fedora.

  His Solution:
  He packaged EiffelStudio as a Flatpak - which is like a universal Linux installer. Think of it like how .exe files work on any
  Windows machine, or .dmg on any Mac. Flatpak bundles the app with all its dependencies in a sandbox.

  Current Status:
  - It works (tested on Ubuntu 24.04)
  - It's local only - you can't just click "Install from Store"
  - You have to build it yourself using his attached files

  The Installation Steps (Simplified):
  1. Install the Flatpak tools on your system
  2. Download some base runtime libraries from Flathub (the Flatpak "app store")
  3. Unzip his archive
  4. Run a build command
  5. EiffelStudio appears in your desktop menu with an icon

  Why This Matters:
  - One package works on ANY Linux distro
  - No more hunting for dependencies
  - Clean uninstall (sandboxed)
  - Could eventually be a one-click install from Flathub (like an app store)

  What's Needed Next:
  For one-click installation, either:
  - Eiffel Software works with Flathub to publish it there, OR
  - Eiffel Software hosts their own Flatpak repository

  It's a community contribution to make EiffelStudio easier to install on Linux.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Eiffel Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to eiffel-users...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/eiffel-users/369d87e2-0531-4261-b336-0296cd6e0d74n%40googlegroups.com.

[Chris Tillman]

This worked for me on my Debian wsl instance (Linux-on-Windows). But I needed to add sudo in front of the flatpak commands, in order to avoid 

error: Unable to connect to system bus

Time to show up at work now, but I'll test out the installation later.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/eiffel-users/CA%2B3qnjcz2Pp9YP1fNW-d3XQw2pDTpor02p0%3D-2PXSavSRqL8zA%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Chris Tillman
Developer