Both Waveforms 2 and 3 fail to run/install on Debian/Jessie AMD64

[Franz]

I am using Debian/Jessie on a AMD64 platform. I am unable to use my Analog Discovery because Waveforms does not function any longer. Here are the problems.

1) Both the available versions of Waveforms2 (version 2.9.4 and version 2.7.5) install without problems (using "dpkg -i"). However both versions fail to run because of a missing libdmgr.so.2 library.

2) Adept (version 2.16.5) installs without problem. However Waveforms3 (version 3.4.7) fails to install because it is missing a system menu definition.

Is there an existing fix or work around for this ? Are these problems likely to be fixed in the near future ?

Just my two cents :

I am grateful that Digilent is supporting Linux users and providing Debian packages. However there is much to be desired in the quality of this packaging. There have been similar problems with the Waveforms previously. I do appreciate supporting the difference between multiple Linux distributions can be quite a problem. For software that is offered gratis, such as Waveforms the best solutions is to open source it, under a suitable license so it can be integrated into and customized for each Linux distribution by or with the help of, the maintainers of those distributions. Not to mention the cost savings and community support that Digilent will gain in the process. If this is not a possibility then the next best thing is to create source packages (.spec for rpm and debian directory for deb) that confirm to the packaging policies of few chosen seminal distributions such as Fedora and Debian (stable) and then use build servers (perhaps using docker) that create builds for each version of those distributions on the distribution itself. On Debian, tools such as pbuilder and lintian eliminate a lot of these packaging problems. It seems like the above deb packages are not being built using the Debian packaging system on a Debian system. This is because in trying to included the package into a local Debian package repository (created using reprepro) corrupts the APT dependency metadata.

[Franz]

A Correction to my above post. The two version of Waveforms2 are 2.5 and 2.7.5.

I did manage to get Waveforms2 working. the problem was missing adept runtime which provides libdmgr.so.

Note if these waveforms packages and be included into locally created source repositories they will automatically identify the missing packages they depend on.

I am still unable to install Waveforms 3 (the problem is not related to adept runtime as mentioned above).

[Franz]

Here is some more detail on the problem with Waveforms3

1) Installation fails with the error : "xdg-desktop-menu: No writable system menu directory found."

2) After failed intall Removal/Purge also fails with the error : xdg-mime: file '/usr/share/mime/packages/digilent.waveforms.xml' does not exist

By manually editing /var/lib/dpkg/info/digilent.waveforms.* files I was able to force uninstallation.

[Franz]

Finally I did manage to get Waveforms3 installed by just commenting out all lines (xdg mime and desktop installation) in the post install script which I pointed out to be problem in my previous post. 

I hope Digilent developers would kindly fix these problems in the next release. Also I hope Digilent management, please do consider a more closer integration of this software with upstream Linux distributions as mentioned in my first post. These type of problems just will not happen if you encourage your developers to go through the process of integrating their package into the official Debian repository.

[attila]

Hello,

Thank you for the observation.

[Sina]

I've been having issues installing the latest debian versions of Waveform.  After install, I cannot run the application.

I do as instrcuted, I install Adept2 first, and then waveform.  

When running waveform from terminal, here is the error I get:

/usr/lib/digilent/waveforms/waveforms: error while loading shared libraries: libusb-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Here are the latest deb files I install:

digilent.adept.runtime_2.19.2-amd64.deb

digilent.waveforms_3.9.1_amd64.deb

 

 

[attila]

Hi @Sina

Try installing the required library:
$sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0

[Sina]

Thanks Attila, it worked. Wish I had asked the question earlier.

Just for your reference, I was trying to installing on Linux (Beta) on Chromebook.