Connecting Distrobox apps with Flatpak apps

Bluefin
1

Hi, trying to live the container and sandbox lifestyle in Aurora 40! I have Okular installed as a Flatpak. But Krusader oddly isn’t in Flathub, so I installed it as an app inside a Fedora distrobox container. Both work fine on their own (though Krusader is missing a nice icon).

But clicking on a PDF inside Krusader tries to use Libreoffice Draw to read it. No – of course I want to use Okular. But Okular doesn’t appear to be visible to Krusader.

I assume this is some kind of more general permissions issue but I can’t figure out how to fix it. Looked through Flatseal for Okular but nothing pops out to me.

Any ideas?

2

I’m not even sure if that’s possible since you work in a container. But until you get a definitive answer from someone who knwos better, what i would probably try is either:

  1. Search if there is another way to install Krusader in my system (e.x. AppImage).
  2. Since you want these 2 to work together, install Okular in fedora container, export it and remove the flatpak.
3

Installing Okular inside the Fedora container, then exporting, has fixed the problem. But:

  1. Shouldn’t Okular be installed by default in KDE uBlue distros like Aurora? It’s pretty much the standard for PDF reading on KDE I thought? Krusader is more of an edge case since I think it is less common to use a separate file manager.
  2. The general advice for uBlue is to use Flatpak to install GUI apps. But this advice falls down in situations like this one – can’t connect between Flatpak and non-Flatpak apps.
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4

Hi! A bit late to the party, but I think I found a solution. I’ve made the Krusader distrobox with this setup, so it can access to my drives:

distrobox-create --name krusader-box --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/fedora-distrobox:latest --volume /media:/media --volume /mnt:/mnt

I needed Visual Studio Code set as the Editor, and that’s installed from flatpak. Turned out I can access flatpak from the Krusader distrobox, so simply writing this to the General / Viewer/Editor / Editor box solved it:

flatpak run com.visualstudio.code

Hope this helps.

5

So you’re launching “flatpak run” from the distrobox? And it’s working because of your --volume mountpoints?

6

I’m not sure if it’s the mount options. I would guess it’s because I’m using the same image to create the box from, as the fedora distrobox that’s in the system by default. But it’s only a guess. Either of the two, a quick test could solve the question. If you find out which one is needed to have access to flatpak, please share with me.

1 Like