I'm looking at the dependencies of pharo-launcher on ubuntu, and I don't see any dependency on libcairo2:i386.

It's a Cairo dependency, not necessarily Pharo's dependency — i.e. you can use Pharo for a long time and never need cairo.

For a smother Gnu/Linux experience, the message could be a little bit more descriptive, something advicing to check for LibCairo 32 bit in the system and installing it, if it is not present.

Well the error does say 'Cannot locate cairo library. Please check if it installed on your system', and from the paths it's checking its pretty clear what it needs.

So if you are a linux user it's more than enough to see what's going on/what's needed.

And if you are not a linux user, then anything short of exact instructions how to install it would be imho equally useless.

 I have been thinking in some kind of interface with the Nix package manager[2]

Because what's better than telling users how to install a package in a particular distro?

Tell them how to install a whole new package manager in their particular distro and then tell them how to install a package.

We can also go all the way and just bundle all the libraries and have option to download "self-contained linux vm" (this is what I've actually done for one of my projects, because the users didn't have root privilege to install new packages on the computers).

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote:

Evan,

We had this problem in every Data Week workshop. Is just matter of installing the libcairo 32 bits package for your Linux distro. In the case of ubuntu, you could adapt instructions at [1]. For a smother Gnu/Linux experience, the message could be a little bit more descriptive, something advicing to check for LibCairo 32 bit in the system and installing it, if it is not present. About multi-unix package installation support, I have been thinking in some kind of interface with the Nix package manager[2], so when something is not there, Pharo could offer automatic installation.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/107230/what-happened-to-the-ia32-libs-package
[2] http://nixos.org/nix/

Cheers,

Offray

On 10/03/16 09:12, Peter Uhnák wrote:

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Alexandre Bergel <[hidden email][hidden email]> wrote:

Evan, let us know how it goes! This is important to understand what’s going on

Well this is well-known thing. Pharo is 32bit only, so all libraries have to be also.

But maybe it could be mentioned just-in-case somewhere on the website, and ways how to install it on linux (i.e. what command should the linux user execute in his particular distro, e.g. apt-get install libcairo2:i386 on debian/ubuntu, XYZ on Arch linux, etc.)?

For both Windows and Mac the cairo library is bundled with the VM, but in linux it's a bad practice and package manager should be used instead to install the packages (on linux it's actually 6 libraries, but package manager handles the dependencies automatically).

Peter