Tag: snapcraft

Adventures in creating a Snap from an LWJGL2 based game

The old Artifact is still kicking, not too long ago I created a Snap for it. Creating the Snap felt a bit like concocting a magical snapcraft.yaml and and hoping it works out. For the first few attempts the magic never works out, and the process of figuring things out tend to be tedious at best. This was no exception. Here are some of the problems I ran into, hope it helps someone else.

Xprop missing

My first Snap attempt immediately spit out this during startup:

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/usr/bin/xprop": error=2, No such file or directory

This was fixed by adding these lines to my snapcraft.yaml. The layout is needed since xprop is referred to by an absolute path. See this thread for more information.

layout:
  /usr/bin/xprop:
    bind-file: $SNAP/usr/bin/xprop

parts:
  mypart:
    stage-packages:
      - x11-utils

A xrandr puzzle

Next in line was this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer$1.run(AppGameContainer.java:39)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.<clinit>(AppGameContainer.java:36)
	at game.Artifact.main(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.getAvailableDisplayModes(LinuxDisplay.java:951)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.init(LinuxDisplay.java:738)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:138)
	... 4 more

This was caused by xrandr not being installed in the snap, which LWJGL2 uses to find display stuff. This was fixed by adding the x11-server-utils package, which installs xrandr.

stage-packages:
  - x11-xserver-utils

For debugging snaps and finding packages these commands were great.

#This allows you to look at the system as seen from the snap
snap run --shell <your-snapname> 

#This will give the package that installed an executable, in this case xrandr
dpkg-query -S /bin/xrandr

I hope this helps someone else looking to get their application in a Snap.

Artifact Snap and AppImage for Linux

Some time ago I added an AppImage for my old game Artifact, as an easy way of installation on Linux. AppImages have a neat architecture, and hopefully will keep Artifact running for a long time on a lot of systems. AppImages can also be run sandboxed using Firejail if you have little trust in me or the source of the AppImage.

Artifact running as a Snap

Now, AppImages do not really have a nice centralized location where applications can be discovered. There are some initiatives, but it feels a bit crude and lacking some polish.

Snaps and their central registry on the other hand feel way more polished. If anything the content in the store often feels unpolished compared to the store. Snaps also run sandboxed by default. While this is good, it sometimes causes unexpected issues, and can be opted out of.

Making a Snap of a LWJGL 2 application was a bit of a headache, but it worked out in the end. My experience with the Snap documentation in general was good, and most of the work was a breeze after I got the game running as a Snap.

Now, go play some Artifact on Linux!