Creating an AppImage on Ubuntu 12.04

Creating AppImages
1

Hi,

I know that the preferred method to create appimages is to use travis, and that targeting the oldest LTS Ubuntu is the preferred method. But I would like to make an AppImage on Precise - Ubuntu 12.04. The reason is that the codebase doesn’t seem to compile on any higher LTS. (The codebase is here, https://github.com/pdbourke/vlc-warp-2.1
and my experience with building it is here,
https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2013/12/compiling-vlc-warp-from-git.html
)

Just now, I tried building it again on a VM - worked.
Then tried making an AppImage with the same sequence of steps as in the example travis script. But linuxdeployqt-continuous-x86_64.AppImage complained that libraries are too old.

Then I tried the oldest existing linuxdeployqt release (5). That also complained the same thing.

Then I tried compiling the earlier release of linuxdeployqt (4) from source. In the build instructions, it was recommended to use QT Creator appimage 5.7.0 from
https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/QtCreator#files

But that QtCreator-5.7.0-x86_64.AppImage also complained that libraries are too old!

So, my questions are:

  1. Should I try to go ahead and install QT creator from ubuntu’s repos, and then try to build the linuxdeployqt project ? Would that work?

  2. Is there any way in which I can bundle all required depencies, either using linuxdeployqt or manually? Maybe using ldd ?

  3. Or is this whole project not feasible at all?

(Sorry if this is already covered somewhere, just couldn’t find anything current.)

2

Hi,

Replying to my own question.

Finally got an AppImage created with linuxdeployqt by

  1. upgrading gcc on 12.04
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22925717/adding-qmake-cxxflags-std-c11-to-pro-file-in-qt-not-workingon-linux-12-0
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19836858/upgrade-gcc-4-6-3-on-ubuntu-12-04-to-4-8-2

  2. installing QT5
    https://askubuntu.com/questions/279421/how-can-i-install-qt-5-x-on-12-04-lts

  3. copying some libs to a directory and adding this export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt/issues/105

linuxdeployqt said success. Created an AppImage file.

But when I try to run the AppImage file on another machine (newer environment, Linux Mint 18.3) it does not find some of the required files -

./VLCWarp*AppImage
VLC media player 2.1.1 Rincewind (revision 26d1986)
[0x25f03e8] main libvlc error: No plugins found! Check your VLC installation.

Any pointers would be welcome.

( I see that there is a vlc appimage created using a very different set of tools,


Is that the only way I can create a working appimage for VLC-based players?)

3

I tried copying over the directories modules po share extra etc also manually into the appdir/usr/bin directory before running
linuxdeployqt aapdir/usr/share/applications/*.desktop -appimage

That resulted in a 100 MB AppImage (versus the 970 kB appimage earlier) but still gave the same error if I try to run it.

It runs fine on the machine used to build it. But on another machine, it fails with
[0x7793e8] main libvlc error: No plugins found! Check your VLC installation.

Any help would be much appreciated.

4

Also tried the exporting of VLC_PLUGIN_PATH
as suggested here,

That also did not help.

5

I see that probono himself had trouble with packaging vlc as an appimage!
https://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2016-May/107690.html

So I suppose it would be foolish of me to try.

I will try to compile a windows version and run it under wine instead.