Flatpak trouble

Elive System Installed
1

I have installed flatpak on my machine, but cannot install any flatpak, because I keep getting the same errors over and over again, no matter which flatpak I try to install:

flatpak install flathub org.tabos.roger

Note that the directories 

'/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share'
'/home/falter/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share'

are not in the search path set by the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable, so
applications installed by Flatpak may not appear on your desktop until the
session is restarted.

Looking for matches…
Fehler: No remote refs found similar to ‘flathub’

I need a flatpak which otherwise is not available as a normal application or snap. I'd be grateful if someone could explain what is going wrong here and how to (hopefully) fix it.

2

Hmm, that does not necessarily mean the flatpaks aren't installed
It's just that i.e Ubuntu flatpaks expect a different desktop path.

Have you tried starting with i.e 'flatpak run org.tabos.roger' ?

3

If I do this, nothing happens, and

flatpak list

yields no results, so nothing is installed. There actually are two errors in the message, it seems: the second one seems to say that Flathub as a source is not recognized, if I get it right.

4

That means that Flatpaks might not appear in the menu system, I think.
The reason your flatpaks aren't installing is here:

You need to install the flathub repository.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
2 Likes
5

Thanks so much! This is the solution to all the trouble. I have tacitly assumed that if you install flatpak on your system, you are already good to go. You never stop learning...

I managed to install my flatpak, and also the errors about directories not being in XDG_DATA_DIRS have disappeared!

6

Edit: This is not true. The errors are still there, but it does not really matter, since the flatpaks are installed and work. On installation, though, I am not offered the choice of user/system install. They all are in /var now, so I guess it is a system install.

I tried to follow advice from various sources to fix the XDG_DATA_DIRS thing like putting "export ..." into .bashrc or .profile, but this did not solve the issue. Maybe someone here knows more about this.

7

.zshrc or .zprofile :-​)

8

I have switched back to bash - old habit...

9

You need to reload the terminal (exec bash) with the export ... added before you install the flatpak

10

I do not know if I get you right here: do you mean

source .bashrc

or something else?

11

source .bashrc is a terrible idea and might cause memory leaks, etc because it doesn't actually clear local variables and such. It just reloads the .bashrc.

exec bash re-runs the entire shell (and is better than just plain bash because it loads in the current shell so you don't need to type exit twice)

12

Thank you, I think I will leave this as it is. Maybe this whole thing is just a permission problem. At any rate the flatpaks install and run allright.
There is another strange behaviour related to installations which I have observed: it seems that somehow I am always some kind of superuser. When I do 'api APPLICATION' (or its extended version 'sudo apt-get install ...) in Terminal, I am never asked for a password.
If I do 'sudo apt install APPLICATION', however, I am asked for a password. Is there an explanation for this?
Sorry, I am drifting off a bit...

13

Yes, this is the 7th post since marking the topic as "solved".
Please start another thread if there are more problems.