Installing/running Pinegrow on Fedora?

General Questions
1

Hello,

I’m new to Fedora, and consider installing Pinegrow on it. I’m aware that not Fedora, but Ubuntu distribution is officially supported. However, as Fedora is my distribution of choice, it’d be nice to make Pinegrow work on it.

Do you think it’s possible to install Pinegrow on Fedora? If so, what steps should I try to install/launch it? In the docs on installing Pinegrow for Ubuntu, there’re basically three scenarios listed. Which one do you think might fit Fedora the best, so that it’s worth trying following the instructions?

Sorry for the amateurish desription. I really would appreciate if you could help, or point me to the right direction, even though Fedora might not be officially supported. It might benefit others too, as Fedora is the second most popular Linux distro after all.

Thank you in advance!

Kind regards,
Márton Lente

2

Salut!
Have you check this page? Install Pinegrow on Linux | Pinegrow Web Editor

There are few tips for non ubuntu distribution.
All the best

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3

Hello Jerome,

Thank you for your quck reply, and pointing me to the ‘Troubleshooting Pinegrow on non-Ubuntu Linux systems’ on this page, which I wasn’t really aware of.

Without really knowing what I’m doing, trying the command: /PinegrowLinux64.6/PinegrowLibrary --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer from Terminal instantly worked, and launched Pinegrow. There weren’t any preliminary steps required. :slightly_smiling_face:

After a quick trial, everything seems to be working fine no Fedora. I’ll likely report here if anything comes up, but so far all seems good.

Have a nice day,
Márton Lente

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4

Hi Márton,

I’m a Linux user and I’ve had to deal with the challenge of getting Pinegrow to run on a non-Ubuntu distribution. In my case, it’s Debian, the base distribution from which Ubuntu is derived. I have some experience and advice that may be useful.

Although Pinegrow may appear to run fine, it can fail is rather subtle ways on Linux distributions other than Ubuntu. Starting with version 6.1, I found that on Debian Stable (then Debian 10), the Pinegrow’s scss compiler stopped working. This was only fixed after upgrading to Debian Testing (the current Debian Stable, aka Debian 11 or “Bullseye”).

I thought that was the end of my troubles, and that I could run Pinegrow on Debian 11. But then I found that I couldn’t save style attributes to a css rule in a css file! That is probably the most fundamental thing you can do with Pinegrow.

I was able to fix this by forcing Pinegrow to load a lower version of libx11-xcb1 than what Debian 11 provides. Debian 11 provides version 2:1.7.2-1, but Pinegrow only works properly with the version provided by Ubuntu: 2:1.6.9-2. This lower-version libx11-xcb1 in turn required a lower version of libx11-6, which I also downloaded. I got Pinegrow to load these two libraries instead of the regular ones by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable in a shell script. The same shell script then executed PinegrowLibrary.

So I got it working, although I didn’t check EVERYTHING. But after thinking some more, I decided that this slope is too slippery to go down! Pinegrow is liable to break again the next time either Ubuntu or Debian updates its libraries, followed by a Pinegrow update. And as I have seen, Pinegrow can break subtly. The program can LOOK OK, but things may not work right.

So I decided to switch from Debian to Ubuntu (Xubuntu, to be precise). This was a hard decision, and I have had to endure some annoyances from Ubuntu, but I really want to be able to run Pinegrow reliably.

In your case, I don’t believe that Fedora’s libraries will match Ubuntu’s. Therefore I think you can expect trouble, maybe subtle trouble. I think this will happen on any Linux distro other than Ubuntu. I hope I’m wrong.

In my opinion, the only way to virtually guarantee that Pinegrow will work on all modern distributions of Linux is for the developers to release a statically-compiled version for Linux. It would take up maybe 100 MB more disk space, but on modern hardware that’s not an issue.

Good luck!

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5

Hello @lstandish ,

Thank you so much for sharing your very in-depth experience on working with Pinegrow on non-Ubuntu distros! I really appreciate. Also, sorry for my late response.

To be honest, I got a bit stuck with Fedora – coming from Windows, realizing how many things just don’t work out-of-the-box primarily because of very strict permissions, and multiple levels of protections (SELinux, etc.) is something I didn’t expect. For example, setting up a basic web server running locally, with Virtual hosts pointing /home directory is a very challenging task, with lots of research required, which takes basically minutes on Windows.

However, I’m still very motivated to setup Fedora as my primary development environment, mostly from curiosity. I noticed the Pinegrow limitations you listed – as I’m primarily using the tool as a secondary tool in early (front-end development) stages of bespoke web projects, the small issues are something I could live with. I rely on Pinegrow SCSS compiler in all stages of projects though, and I’ve lots of projects with ‘PG dependency’, even though recently I’m more into building projects, that are completely ‘tool-less’.

I’ll report to you how it went, when I’ll have little more experience with the new OS. It might be, I’ll also end up migrating to Ubuntu (even though Fedora is more sympathetic). Thank you so much!

@matjaz , do you have maybe plans compiling and official Pinegrow release for rpm based Linux? I’ve no idea how much work it’d take, however, if achiavable, would be nice.

Thanks,
Márton Lente

6

To anyone interested in using Pinegrow in Linux:

This is a followup on my experience running Pinegrow on Linux.

I replaced Debian on my desktop PC with Ubuntu in order to run Pinegrow 6.1 without needing to fiddle with loading non-standard libraries, with I needed to do under Debian. The fact that I would change my operating system to run a single program is a testament to how much I love Pinegrow!

Under Ubuntu, Pinegrow worked fine, but I was dissatisfied with Ubuntu, which I found slow and buggy compared to Debian. Under Ubuntu, programs sometimes hung or crashed. Going into suspend mode was very slow. And I was constantly annoyed to install updates (to remain, I suppose, on the “bleeding edge.”) Of course, I’m aware that some people want and need the latest-version software that Ubuntu provides, but I much prefer the stability of Debian.

So finally (yesterday) I reinstalled Debian 11, with XFCE window manager. The issues I experienced under Ubuntu (specifically, Xubuntu) disappeared.

So I come to the point: Pinegrow 6.7 appears to run fine out-of-the-box on Debian 11 (Bullseye). I have have my cake and eat it, as they say!

I hope this report on Pinegrow running on Debian helps someone. And thanks to the Pinegrow developers for such amazing software!

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