Issues with Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

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1

I just purchased a Lenovo laptop with Linux. It came with 22.04. I had previously run 24.04 on a much older laptop and wanted it on this new one. But they had disabled release-upgrades. After a week-long struggle with Lenovo Tech Support and the good folks here, got 24.04.1 installed. Not going to go into the long and gory details (they are here and here), because they are irrelevant to this issue.

What is relevant is that I ended up in the unusual circumstance of needing to totally erase the 24.04 system and reinstall the factory-release of 22.04 LTS (which I had saved on a USB stick) after the 24.04.1 I had managed to install was too problematic to continue with.

But while I was running 24.04, I installed an app that required flatpak. It installed there simply and flawlessly. Trying to run the same steps on 22.04 has not let me install the wanted app.

These were the commands I had run on 24.04. They worked there. They did not work on 22.04.

sudo apt install flatpak
sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
reboot
flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform//22.08 org.freedesktop.Sdk//22.08
sudo apt install flatpak-builder
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-dir io.github.benini.scid.yml

This last failed with

$ flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-dir io.github.benini.scid.yml
Can't load 'io.github.benini.scid.yml': Failed to open file “/home/scohen/io.github.benini.scid.yml”: No such file or directory

flatpak-builder is treating io.github.benini.scid.yml as the specification of a local disk file rather than something in the flatpak cloud space.

Can someone explain why this is happening?

2

This part looks correct and should work on 22.04.

Is your goal only to install the https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.benini.scid flatpak package from flathub?

If so, the Terminal command to do that is

flatpak install flathub io.github.benini.scid

No need to specifically install the runtime and SDK. When you install a flatpak package, flatpak will take care of making sure the correct version(s) of the correct runtime(s) are installed along with it.

flatpak-builder is not required for normal installing a flatpak package from flathub - it’s for building flatpak packages from source. Based on the permissions of the SCID flatpak, I wouldn’t expect flatpak-builder to be required for using this app either

3

Yes, it is, thank you very much. The flatpak-builder looked odd to me but I had it firmly in memory that it worked before I reimaged back to 22.04. This application, and its site seem to be in some sort of state of flux between build-it-yourself and flatpak and I don’t think they’ve cleaned it up yet.

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