/e/ OS "easy" installer: how to help packaging it to MacOS and Windows

Community Easy Installer
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The /e/OS “easy” installer is soon to be available for a wide range of phones: Samsung Galaxy S6, S7, S7 Edge, S9 and S9 Plus (all Exynos based models).

It will be available for Linux first. As it’s a Java application it should be quite easy to have it run on Windows and MacOS.

This is the place to discuss how to package the /e/ OS installer to MacOS and Windows.

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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I was able to build and run it on windows in my IDE and I hope I can find some time to help :slight_smile:

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How will it be packaged/distributed for Linux? I’m curious if it might run under WSL2 for Windows usage.

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Message deleted to move it to the one dedicated to devices

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It’s a snap package.

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Ok, now that the installer is released officially I’ve got a few questions.

I’ve followed https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/tools/easy-installer/-/wikis/Build-with-Gradle and indeed I got the three packages for linux, windows and mac.
What actually needs to be done here?
If I unpack the windows installer, I can execute the .bat file from the bin folder and it seems to be working (I have an FP3 and that’s not yet supported, so I can’t check if the full installation would work).

And how to contribute technically?
For example, I can’t fork the repo. “You have reached your project limit” is the tooltip when I want to select my own namespace.
Also, I don’t see the “issues” menu entry, so it’s not possible to create new issues.

Edit: ah, noticed one more thing.
The repo has https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/tools/flash-scripts/-/tree/folder_per_platform as a submodule. And that has one branch with scripts per platform but only a subset of script while master has more scripts but no windows version.

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The https://snapcraft.io/easy-installer latest/beta v.0.8.3-beta is only for host machines running linux 64-bit. Where do the Wind°ws and Mac versions come from?

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From what I understood, the /e/ team is looking for people who can assist them in providing the Windows and Mac versions.
That’s why I asked “What actually needs to be done here?”

From looking at the source code my guess is that

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Thanks for the inputs Ingo. Will pass it on to the developers and get the modifications made.

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a windows version would be really great, would massively increase the number of potential /e/ users that could use the installer

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Developers on Windows now can actually clone and work on the source code after this important change done by the /e/ team: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/backlog/-/issues/1275

Thanks! :grinning:

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hi, so with my limited programming experience: what precisely needs to be done to build the installer for Windows?

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Nobody really commented on my assumptions I posted 6 day ago: /e/ OS "easy" installer: how to help packaging it to MacOS and Windows

My first item has been done by the /e/ team, so I guess it’s still building and executing the installer on windows and testing it with one of the currently supported Samsung phones to see what is missing.

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As we mentioned before further development on the easy-installer and making it work on other OS - Windows , Mac or other is for the community to take up. This includes customizing the installer for more devices.
The /e/ dev team will fix bugs if any in the existing code like the case-sensitive image issue that was reported and has been fixed.
The main task now pending on the side of the /e/ dev team is to improve the process for users to fork, modify and merge changes to the code. This should be completed by this week or early next week is the update I got from the team.

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hi Ingo, i read it, just did not understand it. Could you explain in layman’s terms and in a bit more detail what step 2 and 3 would involve?

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Ok, I can try.

You need to follow this guide: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/tools/easy-installer/-/wikis/Build-with-Gradle

As a short summary

git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/tools/easy-installer.git
cd easy-installer
.\gradlew dist

This will create the windows installer as build/distributions/easyInstaller-windows-x64.zip inside the easy-installer folder.

Unzip this archive somewhere and execute easy-installer.bat in the bin subfolder.

Now you’ve got the installer running on windows.

And from that point on it’s “see if it works, try to find out why not if it doesn’t”.

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alright thanks I’m gonna try this, it sounds like something i can do. Haha if it doesn’t work though, my ability to try to find out why not will be very limited, but perhaps others can help

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Any news on this/chance that it might be ready this week?

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This should happen by next week. The team did some tests and it worked . Need to do some more changes to check backup and improve some security points before making it live for all.

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While this system is being put in place in case there are users who want to get in some code into the easy-installer master code base this is what they can do :

  • Make your code modifications
  • If you can create a merge request go ahead and do it or else send the patch file or directly send the code to the developer @vincent.bourgmayer
  • Vincent will check and test and review the code
  • If everything is alright he would merge
  • If there are some corrections required he would get in touch with you
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