Posted by Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas-2 on Mar 10, 2016; 3:09pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Roassal2-on-Ubuntu-64-tp4883675p4883823.html

Hi,

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.

Sorry I don't explain myself properly. I was meaning a window with this message instead of a error trace, which could be intimidating. Something with the same message and buttons like "Ok", "Launch debugger". In the workshops there are some Gnu/Linux newbies and the hidding the error trace for a while seems to be helpful to them.

 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.

No, but because we could build a wrapper for particular packages that installs Nix, and then others (32 bits variants of libcairo or sqlite, pandoc, etc) without caring about a particular Unix variant (being them Mac or hundreds Gnu/Linux distros based on dozen of "bases"), making the experience smother for the newbie, providing he/she has root privileges. People will not see nix anywhere, not even for installing (by the way it is just one command no matter of the distro -curl) and then any other external package would be available. So no need to be sarcastic here Peter.

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).

That would be a nice option at least for Moose/Roassal related experiences.

Cheers,

Offray