Hey desktoppers. I just saw this video from a popular UK YouTuber who plays games on Linux. He made a couple of points indicating bugs in Ubuntu 16.04. One that installing a downloaded deb in Ubuntu Software doesn’t work. The second was launching a just-installed deb from the archive doesn’t work.
Is this really our current status, or maybe he didn’t update before testing?
Something @robert.ancell knows I suspect?
The first defect - Failure to install a 3rd party deb - is bug 1708936 and fixed in gnome-software 3.20.5-0ubuntu0.16.04.6 currently in xenial-proposed. This SRU is verified and should be uploaded to -updates pretty soon.
I just tried installing Steam in 16.04 LTS and it doesn’t show up in a search result. This is because it doesn’t appear to be in the appstream data. Is anyone else able to install it like the video author? Also, it seems to be in multiverse which is not enabled by default?
Edit: This might only show in i386?
I just spun up a brand new clean (not updated) install of 16.04.3 i386 and amd64. Multiverse is enabled by default.
apt-get update, check if steam is in the archive (it is)At this point I could have used apt to install, but the point of the video was that new users shouldn’t need to use the command line to install steam, so I didn’t do that. I did this in parallel on i386 and amd64 installs and got the exact same result from both. Here’s the i386 screengrabs.
So for me, I can’t install from the archive, and installing using the defaults from a downloaded deb doesn’t work either, on a “clean” install.
Seems not. So while installing debs maybe fixed as per the bug @jibel mentioned, it looks like we have something preventing steam from the archive showing up in Ubuntu Software.
It’s probably as Robert said:
a problem with showing i386 packages on amd64.
What is in /var/lib/app-info/yaml/ and what does appstreamcli search steam show?
If nothing, then this should be filed as a bug on package appstream (and ideally upstream too), initially - there might be Software work too.
I did it in two VMs, one i386 and one AMD64. I got the exact same result on both.
There’s a lot of yml.gz files in /var/lib/app-info/yaml/. zcat | grep steam returned nothing.
On amd64:
alan@cleanamd64:~$ appstreamcli search steam
Identifier: ri-li.desktop [desktop-application]
Name: Ri-li
Summary: a toy simulator game
Package: ri-li
Icon: ri-li_ri-li.png
----
alan@cleani386:~$
On i386:
alan@cleani386:~$ appstreamcli search steam
Identifier: steam.desktop [desktop-application]
Name: Steam
Summary: Application for managing and playing games on Steam
Package: steam
----
Identifier: ri-li.desktop [desktop-application]
Name: Ri-li
Summary: a toy simulator game
Package: ri-li
Icon: ri-li_ri-li.png
----
alan@cleani386:~$
So it’s in appstream (i386 only) but doesn’t show in Software.
At this point this thread is a bug report and should be on Launchpad please.