How To Install Appimage Software Packages

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You may have seen that some software is distributed not as RPM (native Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS), not as DEB file (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint) but as Appimage files. Today's post shows how to install software from Appimage.

Attempting to Open Appimage File

Typically you would download an Appimage file and try to open it from the file manager of your choice. In Ubuntu 19.04 I got the following when double-clicking the freshly downloaded Appimage file:

How To Run Appimage File

The thing is, you need to make the downloaded Appimage file executable using chmod command. Open the Terminal app, find the file (in my case it's in /home/greys/Downloads), check its current permissions:

Now make the file executable:

greys@xps:~/Downloads $ ls -la *AppImage
-rw-rw-r-- 1 greys 80446710 Oct  9 23:26 standard-notes-3.0.17-x86_64.AppImage

… and run it:

greys@xps:~/Downloads $ chmod a+rx standard-notes-3.0.17-x86_64.AppImage

I got the following prompt shown:

And that was it, the app (Standard Notes) ran:

… and started showing output in the console:

greys@xps:~/Downloads $ ./standard-notes-3.0.17-x86_64.AppImage 
Unable to read JSON file /home/greys/.config/Standard Notes/Updates/settings.json
Checking for updates…
[20:36:03:0082] [info] Checking for update
[20:36:03:0674] [info] Generated new staging user ID: c3f01e63-16bb-543e-90c1-dae92caa5488
Finished checking for updates. Latest version: 3.0.17 Current version: 3.0.17
[20:36:05:0388] [info] Update for version 3.0.17 is not available (latest version: 3.0.17, downgrade is disallowed).
Syncing components: 1
Syncing components: 1
Syncing components: 1
Data backup succesfully saved:  2019-10-09T20-36-15.181Z.txt
Syncing components: 1t

So, to sum up, the way to use Appimage files is to download them, make them executable and then run. I imagine there usual security measures of double-checking checksums should apply, otherwise there's a risk of downloading and running something that's not a package but a malicious software only pretenting to be one.