AppImage

This page describes building of AppImage binary package.

The building process is easy: download the required software and run appimage.sh script.

The script

The shell script

dist/appimage.sh

in Munipack source tree is AppImage packager.

Prerequisites

The software listed below is mandatory for building:

Fortran 95 and C++ compilers
GTK3 development libraries
Both make and cmake
fuse (why?)

All the requirements are available in any good Linux distribution.

AppImage tools

The main utility appimagetool is left unused. The packaging itself is provided by

linuxdeploy (download) having
module for GTK (download).

In the terminology of AppImage, Munipack is build by Manual way into the standard directory tree by AppDir specification.

Source packages

These packages are required to build AppImage for Munipack:

PLPLot
Minpack, available in Debian's source package as .tar.gz

wxWidgets

Directory structure

The building script dist/appimage.sh requires the set of source packages collected into a directory. The tree structure as it will be referenced below:

    appimage/
       bin/
       src/

appimage/src/ is the place where linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage and linuxdeploy-plugin-gtk.sh are available.

appimage/src/ is the place where the source packages are collected.

Building

The previous steps guaranties to be all requisites are ready. Now, it's the moment of truth:

  $ APPDIR=/path/to/appimage/
  $ MUNIPACK=/path/to/munipack-X.Y.Z/
  $ PATH=$PATH:$APPDIR/bin sh $MUNIPACK/dist/appimage.sh $APPDIR/src/

If the building process is successful, a new package does appear in the current working directory. Be patient, it take a while.

Usage

A simple launch (by hand in terminal or by click of an icon in a file manager) invokes xmunipack by default.

Munipack's command line interface munipack is activated by making the link:

    $ ln -s Munipack-x86_64.AppImage munipack

It is base on the trick representing argv[0] as the current executable file name.