#snapd

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my ongoing quest regarding the world of Linux. I'm afraid I start the episode with some sad news... I am now officially announcing the death of the HP Z400 Workstation.  If you have followed the series in any form you may have heard me going on about the W3550 Xeon machine and its many issues.  Well the power supply died which I did manage to replace.  It worked once and then refused to start ever again.

The led on the system flashes green which means there is power to the system, but the bios just refuses to start making me believe the motherboard is at fault.  Given the ongoing issues I have had with said machine I honestly do not want to continue to throw money at it, so it is now legally dead.

Can it be repaired, I'm sure it can be.  Have I got any desire to do so at this time.  The answer is no.  In the future if I can be bothered to find a replacement motherboard it may resurrect from the ashes but for now it is strictly non functional.

If anyone feels like sending me a replacement motherboard I would happily accept it but I don't expect anyone has a spare HP Z400 motherboard or a W3550 Xeon compatible motherboard just lying around their house.  Even if you do I would not expect you just to give me it for free as they don't just grow on trees.

However if you are feeling generous feel free to contact me at [email protected] and let me know.  This isn't a request or any form of begging.  As I said as far as I'm concerned the machine is out of action for the time being and that is quite acceptable as I have various machines that still work more than happily so it is not an essential part of day to day life.

If anything it was a machine I used for testing various Linux distributions and other things on but I have other machines just as capable to use.  To quote the infamous Dead Parrot Sketch from Monty Python... it's not dead, it's just resting...

Moving on ... So lately I have been playing with a couple of programs that are still alpha software.  The first program is Anbox.  This is a program that allows you to run Android in a Box on Linux.  Now on the Anbox site it recommends you install the program using the Snap from the beta channel of Snapcraft.io

However you can find it in the AUR if you are using Arch.  To use it on Arch you need to first install the DKMS drivers, download the Android image, build the Anbox Bridge and if you want to install stuff there is an image with the Google App Store and Super SU for rooted stuff.

The Snap image is just a basic Android image without the Google App Store so if you want to add it too the snap you will probably have to side-load it using the android-tools package adb program.        

However if you use the AUR version they forget to inform you that you need to setup the system container service using systemctl enable anbox.container.service the first time to get the container system running in SystemD. To get the program working run Anbox-bridge, then finally Anbox to get it to work.

If you fail to run Anbox-bridge the network will not be available to Anbox so you can't use Android to connect to any of the services like Play Store or anything else requiring internet services.

If you have snapd installed or are running a version of Linux that includes the ability to use snaps like Ubuntu then you don't have to worry about all that as it is built into the snap itself just run the Anbox snap command

But hang on minute you said this is an alpha.  Yes I did and although you have basic access to certain things, some problems do exist.  The Google Play store works but actually finding apps that work is a bit hit and miss.

Anbox seems to use some of the QEMU code to get itself running, however the ARM code while some works not all of it does at this time.  I managed to get an app running such as Pure Writer but several games didn't work.  

I discovered that if there is a Universal version of a game or app it will probably work as it has been compiled to work with Android x86.  I managed to get Altos Adventure version 1.7.3 running using this but version 1.7.4 is Arm only and won't run.

Places like APKMirror will tell you the architecture used when you download it but not many sites do.  Tests from the Play Store with things like Altos Odyssey which as far as I know I have not found a universal version, the game would start but there was no graphics on screen.

However remember this is an alpha so in time I am sure they will solve said issues.  Apparently they do update the snap regularly but you need to download that from the edge channel as opposed to the beta channel.  Like with any alpha software it's possible they may fix such issues but you do so at your own risk.

Its an interesting idea but at the moment given it can only run Universal Android code you have no advantage using it over the other Android running alternatives (Shashlik and Genimobile) at the moment which primarily run Android x86 code.  However in time who knows, I will keep an eye on it and if anything significant happens I will report back.

Next I moved on to something else in alpha.  The program in question is Vita3k which as the name suggests it is an emulator of the Playstation Vita.  Now they do build nightly so it is a highly ongoing emulator.  The emulator is available Windows, MacOS and Linux.  However like all emulators regarding legalities that is totally in your court.

I doubt Sony is going to come and break down your door to serve you papers for attempting to run their software but like all emulators its better to state I am not held responsible what happens to your system or anyone else's if you run alpha code.

Now being a modern emulator it needs to have shader support on your graphics card.  Which does rule out running it on certain systems. I doubt I could run it on the i7 potato.  However I did get it running on the i7 desktop as it has an Nvidia 1050GT which has Shaders 4.2 support.

At the time of me typing this the emulator claims it can run 4 games.  Of them all I only got one to work.  I managed to get Alone with You working which is sort of an adventure game.  They claim Fruit Ninja, My Name is Mayo and VA-11 HALL-A also work but the versions I got installed but then failed to work.

I'm sure I didn't get the appropriate ROMs but to be honest I am not going to lose much sleep about these titles not working.

Before any game will work first you have to go to the Playstation store and download the latest firmware.  Then install it using the emulator.

I sat and played Alone with you and while the game was nothing to write home about.  It did run at 30 FPS quite consistently and was definitely playable.  Controls were using the keyboard and to be honest at least one thing did work including it updated the game from version 1.00 to 1.02.

It has an interesting way of installing games you can load the file as a VPK or you can go into the rom dump compress the files to a single zip file and install it from that.

As I said the other games that are listed as working may have VPK versions I just didn't find.  However it did run at least one of the games even though many others as of yet don't.

However as well as having the nightly downloads at Vita3k.org there is also a compatibility list for commercial and homebrew games so when the code improves in time.  Who knows what we will get.

I am an emulator enthusiast but this has the potential to be interesting.  If you want to help out the developers of Vita3k they do have a Patreon account.

Unless Sony shuts them down which is not out of the realms of possibility nowadays.  We hope they don't as they have not with previous emulators of their platforms.

The Snap Store Desktop App is Available for Linux User

Canonical has released the snap store desktop app, which allow users to manage the snap apps easily through GUI.

Snap Store app is a fork of GNOME Software, which is dedicated to snap apps management.

Don’t think that won’t support other apps. It’s not limited to only manage snap applications, users can install other regular applications like repo apps, AppImage, Flatpak apps, etc via snap…

HOME 디렉토리의 위치가 변경되서 발생한 문제로

apparmor 를 수정해서 해결되지 않는다.

command line:

$ mkdir /home/user1 $ mount --bind /data/home/user1 /home/user1

/etc/fstab: