{"id":3929,"date":"2025-03-05T15:54:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T15:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/?p=3929"},"modified":"2025-03-05T15:54:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T15:54:05","slug":"signal-on-raspberrypi-without-snap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/?p=3929","title":{"rendered":"Signal on RaspberryPi without Snap!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Let me start this article by confessing that I hate Snap<\/em><\/strong> on Linux!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole idea that you’d need a container type environment to install an application on a Unix system is very far from where I want to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It annoys me that snaps are updated automatically too. I know you can disable this but, I shouldn’t have too. App’s should only get updated when I want to update them, not before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I really hate is the fact that the Snap back end system is proprietary and owned solely by Canonical, the Ubuntu people. This goes against my OpenSource<\/strong><\/em> ethos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly I had to install Snap to get the Signal messenger app<\/a> installed on my RaspberryPi 5 desktop computer. App’s installed via Snap are extremely slow to start, run slow and are heavy on resources. Snap also mounts a whole bunch of dependency Snaps via loop devices to make the app work. Snaps make a real mess of your system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when Snap did an automatic upgrade to Signal to a version that has a serious bug in it causing it to crash a minute or so after startup. I initially reverted to the previous version to get it working again but, sure enough Snap did another auto-update and broke it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time I couldn’t revert back to the previous version as Canonical, in their infinite wisdom decided to remove the previous version of Signal from their Snap store!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I removed the Signal Snap from my computer, along with all the “hanger on”<\/em><\/strong> snap packages that were clogging up the RaspberyyPi 5 and finally did a complete purge of snapd<\/em><\/strong> using dpkg<\/em><\/strong> to get rid of all the horrendous snap mount points on the file system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a reboot I then went hunting for the Signal messenger app<\/a> source code. Looking through the code it’s not a 5min job to get it compiled on a RaspberryPi and so I followed a few of the forked versions to see if someone had already done all the hard work for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After disappearing down a few Rabbit Holes<\/a> I eventually stumbled into the world of Pi Apps<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pi Apps is a neat little app that provides access to the “most popular app store for RaspberryPi computers”<\/em>. It’s 100% free, OpenSource<\/em><\/strong> and written in shell scripts. Perfect!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Installing the “Pi Apps” app is straight forward and only takes a few moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pi-Apps
Pi-Apps – App store for RaspberryPi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Opening Pi-Apps I found a multitude of OpenSource apps all ready to be installed at the click of a button. In no time at all I’d found Signal and had it installed without getting anywhere near the dreaded Snap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The version of Signal available at the time of writing this article is v7.39.0 which is fine as this is a stable, bug free version that works reliably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re using a RaspberryPi computer I can highly recommend you install the Pi-Apps app to enhance your collection of great OpenSource programmes to make your little raspberry flavoured buddy even more useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More soon …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me start this article by confessing that I hate Snap on Linux! The whole idea that you’d need a container type environment to install an application on a Unix system is very far from where I want to be. It annoys me that snaps are updated automatically too. I know you can disable this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Signal on RaspberryPi without Snap!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[453,451,36,300,435,4,38,135,411,452,439,122,412,351,299,215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appstore","category-canonical","category-code","category-compile","category-github","category-ham-radio","category-linux","category-opensource","category-pi-5","category-pi-apps","category-pi4","category-raspberrypi","category-raspberrypios","category-raspbian","category-sourcecode","category-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3929"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3943,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3929\/revisions\/3943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m0aws.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}