I have been working on getting Inform 7 installed under the current version of Ubuntu this week, and I tried the flatpak available online.
It did seem to work and launch correctly, but I ran into some permissions problems with it:
- The program was unable to save any work. You can start a new project and click save, and it won’t give you any errors that I could see, but nothing actually gets saved anywhere.
- You can’t navigate into your home directory or anywhere else from within the Inform IDE.
- It is not possible to make any changes inside the Edit->Preferences dialog.
I am a pretty technical guy but I’m only a beginner with Linux, so take the following with a grain of salt, but here’s what I found:
You can have flatpak grant the app permissions to your home directory by doing the following:
sudo flatpak override --filesystem=home
That enables you to save stuff in your home directory, but it doesn’t resolve the inability to make changes to the Preferences in the IDE.
I was able to manually install the dependencies required and use the regular installer successfully, but I think the flatpak approach makes a lot of sense and it’d be good to have full functionality through that method; I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.