$ mkdir ~/bin & mv kiwix-desktop_x86_64.appimage ~/bin/ $ wget Īlthough an appimage can be downloaded to and ran from any directory, in order to keep the filesystem well organized, let’s move it to a more appropriate directory before we make an application launcher for it. To download and run this appimage on the command line all you need to do is enter the following commands to download the file, make it executable, and run it. If you click the link for Linux, then you will be able to download the latest version as an appimage. On the official download page there are download links available for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and browser extensions. It has grown to allow downloading and offline reading from other sources as well, but those details are beyond the scope of this article. Kiwix is a free and open source application that lets you do download all of Wikipedia and read it offline. For the purposes of this tutorial we will download the Kiwix appimage from the official Kiwix website. One of the benefits of the appimage format is that you can download the application directly from the developer’s website no matter what distribution you are using. If you want an application launcher, then you need to create it yourself. In order to open the application, you need to make this file executable and launch the application by specifying the path to it on the command line or double clicking the file in your file manager, which in the case of Ubuntu would be nautilus. On the other hand, when you download an application that is distributed as an appimage file, it is just another file on your computer.
Typically, when you install an application via the distribution’s package manager, it neatly integrates into the system and an application launcher is created for you. These features are often seen as benefits of appimages, but depending on how you prefer to launch applications, they may also be a drawback. We previously covered Snaps and Flatpak which provide similar features.
Appimages make no changes to your system, and they are portable universal binaries that includes all dependencies and libraries within it. When you download the appimage file, there is no installation and no root privileges necessary.
As a result, you may find that some software is only available in the appimage format for your distribution. Developers are able to package their application into an appimage file once and it will run on any distribution. This is a very convenient method of installation for the end user, but for developers it can be a lot of extra work to package their applications separately for each distribution’s package manager. In the case of Ubuntu, that would be apt. Traditionally, applications are installed by using the package manager. When you execute an appimage file, it is temporarily mounted on your file system in order to run. $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged userĪn appimage file is a compressed image of an application and any libraries it uses. # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command is not required except in an optional step where we install an icon theme. No specific software is required, but our examples use kiwix
Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
How to Create an Integrated Application Launcher For an Appimage file in Ubuntu Software requirements and conventions used Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions Category