[Feature request] Provide an AppImage for Linux

[probonopd]

Providing an AppImage would have, among others, these advantages:

• Applications packaged as an AppImage can run on many distributions (including Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, elementaryOS, Linux Mint, and others)
• One app = one file = super simple for users: just download one AppImage file, make it executable, and run
• No unpacking or installation necessary
• No root needed
• No system libraries changed
• Works out of the box, no installation of runtimes needed
• Optional desktop integration with appimaged
• Optional binary delta updates, e.g., for continuous builds (only download the binary diff) using AppImageUpdate
• Can optionally GPG2-sign your AppImages (inside the file)
• Works on Live ISOs
• Can use the same AppImages when dual-booting multiple distributions
• Can be listed in the AppImageHub central directory of available AppImages
• Can double as a self-extracting compressed archive with the --appimage-extract parameter
• No repositories needed. Suitable/optimized for air-gapped (offline) machines

Here is an overview of projects that are already distributing upstream-provided, official AppImages.

Complex Python/Qt applications are shipped in AppImage format, such as Ultimaker Cura. There are tools like https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy-plugin-conda to greatly facilitate the process.

If you have questions, AppImage developers are on #AppImage on irc.freenode.net.
Possibly @TheAssassin would be willing to help, or even send a PR.

[ManuGithubSteam]

I support this!

[finnbear]

Please do something like this so we don't have to compile everything :)

[fabiencastan]

Yes, that would be great to see a PR for AppImage!
Btw, we provide a Dockerfile to build the project (assuming that this should ease the creation of an AppImage).

@finnbear : In the meantime, we already provide linux and windows binaries: https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom/releases
So you don't have to compile and this should be compatible with all (non-too-old) linux version. Let us know you have any issue.

[TheAssassin]

You could try to run appimagetool on the contents of that .tar.gz, after performing two steps (creating a symlink AppRun in the root dir to whatever should be run on the AppImage startup (or creating a simple shell script that runs whatever shall be run -- also allows for setting env vars etc.), and creating/symlinking a desktop file and matching icon (ideally a PNG) in the root dir, too.

[probonopd]

That'd work, although wouldn't be fully optimized in terms of download size. I think it currently bundles more of Qt than is necessary.

[TheAssassin]

That's an art we haven't been able to solve reliably in linuxdeploy-plugin-conda yet either, but we added a bunch of rms to some build scripts to get rid of not-so-interesting Qt stuff and saved quite some space.

I think using the conda plugin would save more space from the beginning anyway, looking into the data, but I don't have time to try it out. If anyone from Meshroom wants to give it a shout, please pass by in #appimage on Freenode. Otherwise, turning the tarball into an AppImage would be a great start.

[Hans2004]

I am having the same issue on a HP Pavilion laptop. This is an optimus machine with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 chipset. I know that CUDA is installed correctly because it does work when selecting it in Blender. I use the newest driver. OS is OpenSuse Tumbleweed.

But still Meshroom reports:
[20:34:08.830016][warning] Could not determine number of CUDA cards in this system
[20:34:08.829888][warning] No CUDA-Enabled GPU.
[20:34:08.830167][error] cudaGetDeviceCount failed: CUDA driver version is insufficient for CUDA runtime version
[20:34:08.830185][info] Can't find CUDA-Enabled GPU.
[20:34:08.830199][error] This program needs a CUDA-Enabled GPU (with at least compute capablility 2.0).

In windows it works fine on the same machine.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[probonopd]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

Not doing anything is never a good reason to close an issue. Doing so ensures it doesn't get done...

[natowi]

@probonopd There is an error in the bot configuration, this issue is marked as "do not close". This should be fixed by #801