Today I’m experimenting with the Eclipse to Flatpak port that our team has been working on.
To do so, I had to learn Flatpak. It only took 10 minutes to learn the basics needed to survive. I.e adding/listing Flapack repos, installing & removing packages.
Flatpack basics:
- Flatpak is basically a package management system like yum/dnf/apk-get + version defined container for running gui apps.
- Flatpak word does not contain a ‘c’. (I was wondering why flatpack could not be found on my system).
- (Most?) of flatpak can be used via Software Center GUI, but I prefer the command line version as I need to manage repos.
- The command line has very good tab-completion I’ve litereley figured things out by pressing tab when ever I wonder what argument to type next.
- Flatpak is already installed on recent Fedora builds, but by default it has no repositories to feed from. You can add the flathub by opening it from here:
https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora/
To verify that you’ve added the repo, you can list repos via:flatpak remote-list
- To list available packages:
flatpak remote-ls
- To install these: (e.g I tested with Zotero)
flatpak install org.zotero.Zotero flatpak install flathub org.zotero.Zotero #if you want to specify which repo to install from
- To remove a package:
flatpak uninstall org.zotero.Zotero
Eclipse in flatpak
Now I went a head and fidlded around with using Eclipse from Flatpak.
Eclipse comes in it’s own repository, as document by Mat Booth.
To set things up:
# Add the 'eclipse' repo. flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists eclipse https://fedorapeople.org/~mbooth/flatpak/eclipse.flatpakrepo # Btw, if you want to delete a repo in the future, it's easy: flatpak remote-delete eclipse #again, tab completion is your friend. # To see what's in Mat's eclipse repo, you can list it's content: flatpak remote-ls eclipse org.eclipse.Committers # I'm a committer, so I'm gonna go with this version. org.eclipse.Cpp org.eclipse.Java flatpak install eclipse org.eclipse.Committers #this asks if you want to install gnome 3.24 run time. Say yes.
Now you can run eclipse either via overviews or via command:
flatpak run org.eclipse.Committers # or with environment variable: YOUR_ENV_VAR=VALUE flatpak run org.eclipse.Committers
And voila, Eclipse is up and running:
Also useful:
# look for stuff in your flatpak flatpak search vlc # Update packages in the future: flatpack update # list what's installed flatpak list flatpak list --app #only list apps.
Coffee Oriented Programming 