Is it possible to run the Snap store in Puppy?

[Mike Walsh]

Evening, guys'n'gals.

Now then; Uncle Mike needs some advice.

Does anybody here have any experience of getting snap packages working with Puppy? I don't really want to do this, but they've gone & promoted me to moderator over at BleepingComputer...

As part of this, I have to be able to 'intervene', if necessary, on the occasions when I visit BC's Discord server channel, okay? In order for this to work, I have to enable 2FA (two factor authentication) in my Discord a/c.....and the options for this are only two; either Google Authenticator (only for Android or iPhone, neither of which I use, and I ain't buying a new phone just for this..!), or Authy.....which is only available as a (you guessed it) snap package.

So; does anybody have any experience of getting these blasted things working with Puppy? I an NOT even going to consider installing Windoze for this, nor am I prepared to try getting Ubuntu running just for these darned snap packages.

Any suggestions, boys & girls..? Help would be appreciated with this one!

Is it 'do-able'? (Or, failing that, are there any other possibilities out there?)


Mike.

[mikeslr]

deleted

[dancytron]

I did it in Debian Dog in an attempt to get Anbox (to run android apps in linux) working.

IIRC, I was able to get snap to work, or at least seem to work, but Anbox itself wouldn't work after I installed it.

My notes say I had to use the -devel mode.

sorry, that's all I remember.

[Mike Walsh]

Okay, kiddiwinks. Cancel that.....Uncle Mike's found an alternate solution.

Taking a leaf from Jack Wallen over at TechRepublic, I've installed the open-source OTPClient desktop 2FA tool.....and it works great for old farts like me who can't be arsed with smartphones.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ho ... -on-linux/

This nominally comes as an Ubuntu add-on PPA repository only, but I learnt the trick, long ago, of heading across to the Canonical Launchpad website, entering the appropriate part of the PPA line to take me to the 'correct' page.....then once you're there, it's a simple enough matter to dig around & unearth the .deb files that would be downloaded & installed by the 'sudo apt-install xxxxx' command process.

(Honestly, the dodges we Puppians come up with, eh? )

Once installed, and you've gone through the set-up stuff, what you get is this:-





You get a warning very early in the set-up process about your 'memlock' capacity being too low to be stable, or function correctly, or something like that, but I guess this is where the author assumes you're going to be adding scores, if not hundreds of 'tokens'.....accepted security advice being that you really ought to create a separate 2FA token for every single website you log-in to.

I doubt many of us are quite that paranoid, TBH..! In my own case, I'm only going to be using this this for a couple of sites; in addition to Discord, now I have the capability for 2FA I shall also secure my Google a/c with it as well. Because (and this is the bit I really like about it), this app will read QR codes.....and you don't even need a webcam, or smart-phone to do so.

So; how's this possible..?

Quite simply, you have a few options for adding tokens, amongst which is the ability to read a QR code from a PNG image file.....these things seemingly being what everybody uses these days. And you don't need to worry about having to 'scan' the things, or even bother about taking a 'sharp' enough image for a scanner to work with it. Just take a screenshot of the QR code you want to use - just the code square itself; you don't want several inches of desktop showing round it! - save it as a PNG file, select it when asked to, and the app's coding will 'read' the QR code internally, and the next thing you know the 'token' is listed in the GUI.

When you want your code, simply click on it in the GUI, and the 6-digit 2FA code is auto-copied to your clipboard, all ready for pasting wherever it's needed. Which, if I do say so myself, is ab-so-lute-ly brilliant.....and SO easy to use.

This thing is currently working in Bionicpup64, though I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work under Xenialpup64, too. I'll knock together a .pet package of this fairly soon, for anybody else who likes the sound of it. It's a tiny thing, so an SFS is pointless, TBH.

There's also i386 packages for this too, so I may see if I can get a package together that works at least in newer 32-bit Puppies as well. Jack gives a very good tutorial for using the thing in the article linked to above, so if you're having any issues with it, head over there.

Stay tuned.


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

I did it in Debian Dog in an attempt to get Anbox (to run android apps in linux) working.

IIRC, I was able to get snap to work, or at least seem to work, but Anbox itself wouldn't work after I installed it.

My notes say I had to use the -devel mode.

sorry, that's all I remember.

Nah, you're OK, Dan. It's interesting you should say about needing the -devel mode for installing snap stuff; even in this OTPClient (which really does work a treat), at least two of the dependencies this thing uses are also dev packages....

Still; at least this works. It should be a useful addition to the Puppy 'arsenal', I feel.


Mike.

[enrique]

Sorry for the off topic.

I just saw that forum, interesting. One thing for sure Mike Walsh is a brave man. Promoting Linux while been surrounded by all those W10 fanatics. Nice.

[rockedge]

I did get Flatpak working well in Puppy..... never tried Snap yet....I'll give it a whirl

[Mike Walsh]

Right. For anybody who wants a desktop 2FA (2-factor authentication) app for modern Puppies, working packages for OTPclient-2.1.0 are now available for

- Bionicpup64 8.0
- Xenialpup64 7.5
- DPup 'Stretch' 7.5

You can find these at my Google Drive, here:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Navigate through and help yourselves to the one you want. I shan't be building any other packages, because a) This new hardware of mine simply won't run older Puppies, and b) these packages are only built for as far back as Xenial anyway.

Hope they're useful.


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

Sorry for the off topic.

I just saw that forum, interesting. One thing for sure Mike Walsh is a brave man. Promoting Linux while been surrounded by all those W10 fanatics. Nice.

Hah!

Yes, the Linux sub-forum over at BC is quite small. Good crowd, though. On top of all that, I'm the only Puppy-user over there.....apart from one of the other mods, an Aussie by the handle of NickAu, who is actually a member here, and has been for about 6½ years... Most of 'em are Linux Mint fanbois.

Lawrence Abrams, the site's founder (aka 'Grinler') originally set it up to help folks out mainly with Windoze malware, back in the days of Win ME and XP. Since then, it's grown out of all proportion, with well over a million registered, active users. Little wonder it needs a small army of mods to keep an eye on things..!

TBH, I have very little interaction with the Windoze side of things. I still keep mainly to my own areas of interest, with occasional 'patrols' to keep an eye out for spam.....

I'm still in the middle of 'learning the craft', Enrique. They only promoted me last week, and there's a lot to get your head round; they have a whole moderator's forum set-up, along with training materials & tutorials, etc.....all of which is hidden to the general membership, and only visible to 'staff'. I've told 'em not to expect much out of me for several weeks at least; it'll take me that long to figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not like I have prior experience to draw on, y'see.....

It's a case of "Softly, softly, catchee monkey", mate. I'll get the hang of it all eventually!


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

@ rockedge:-

I did get Flatpak working well in Puppy..... never tried Snap yet....I'll give it a whirl

I guess we'll have to try and embrace these things in Puppy eventually. More and more apps are being packed only in these portable, 'sandboxed' methods.....and there's a lot of good stuff out there which I wouldn't mind trying. It's getting harder to find .deb, .rpm or tar.gz/xz files nowadays!


Mike.

[watchdog]

I have wasted a lot of time with Flatpak apps... Snap store seems to me the same story. These apps do not work in mainstream distros. It's a waste of time to try to import them in puppy. This is only my opinion. If you want to run an app in a puppy which does not support it just make a chroot jail where it works. A chroot jail is a lot smaller.

[rockedge]

both are unwieldy and memory use intensive. I don't like them but knowing how to get those to run does come in handy.

[Mike Walsh]

I have wasted a lot of time with Flatpak apps... Snap store seems to me the same story. These apps do not work in mainstream distros. It's a waste of time to try to import them in puppy. This is only my opinion. If you want to run an app in a puppy which does not support it just make a chroot jail where it works. A chroot jail is a lot smaller.

That I'll agree with. I still can't forget just how well a chroot jail worked with Darry's re-spin of 431.....

The point here, though, is that in many cases it's simply no longer possible to find alternative versions that will work via alternate methods. More and more developers are packaging stuff exclusively as only Flatpaks or Snaps. Nothing else.


Mike.

[rockedge]

More and more developers are packaging stuff exclusively as only Flatpaks or Snaps. Nothing else.

this is true, probably because it easier to maintain the code across multiple platforms especially.

[soniabu]

Right. For anybody who wants a desktop 2FA (2-factor authentication) app for modern Puppies, working packages for OTPclient-2.1.0 are now available for

- Bionicpup64 8.0
- Xenialpup64 7.5
- DPup 'Stretch' 7.5

You can find these at my Google Drive, here:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Navigate through and help yourselves to the one you want. I shan't be building any other packages, because a) This new hardware of mine simply won't run older Puppies, and b) these packages are only built for as far back as Xenial anyway.

Hope they're useful.


Mike.

excellent Mike, many thanks
sonia