Dec 30, 2017 • juanrubio

A lot of people have recently come to Tizonia’s issue tracker on GitHub to request binaries for their specific Linux distro, version, and/or platform.

Unfortunately, packaging a complex piece of software like Tizonia to run on many Linux distributions is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming activity.

As of today, Tizonia is written in three languages, C, C++ and Python and contains a command-line application, two daemon servers, twelve helper libraries to access the various music services and around twenty-five OpenMAX IL plugins to support the media decoding activities. Using the traditional packaging systems, like Debian ‘deb’, or Red Hat ‘rpm’ simply does not scale well without a huge human power behind the packaging activities of the project.

So new cross-distribution app package methods for Linux are starting to show feasibility these days. One of them is the Snappy package system. ‘Snaps’ are containerised software packages that can be installed on many Linux distributions.

Tizonia Snap Package

From now, a snap package of Tizonia can be downloaded and installed for amd64, i386, and armhf devices in Debian, SUSE, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu and derivatives.

See Tizonia’s Snap documention for details on how to install it on your distro of choice.

Tizonia Docker Image

Another insteresting software distribution method is Docker. Docker is a modern technology to allow distribution of containerized software applications.

See Tizonia’s Docker image documention for the details on how to download the image and use it on your favorite platform.

Other Cross-distro Packaging Systems

There are a couple of other contenders in this Linux cross-distribution packaging system space. They are Flatpak and AppImage. So far AppImage looks very insteresting, since it is the only one that does not require prior downloading of a ‘run-time’ of some kind, which all the other systems need (Docker, Snap and Flatpak). Perhaps Tizonia will be available as an AppImage soon!