Balena Etcher (Appimage) refusing to run on AntiX ?

[Member flyingchap]

Hello AntiXers

For ten years (after my ‘conversion’) I’ve was a keen user of Lubuntu, and have often used the very good Balena Etcher (USB flash drive writer), which works faultlessly on Ubuntu flavours from my experience.

BUT I’m now using AntiX for lower-powered/ modest-ram machines and finding it Very good for all – many congratulations, and thanks, to all the team that build it.

But I’ve found a small gremlin: it just doesn’t want to run, Balena Etcher. Perversely, it simply reports
“No such file or directory” when the executable, very patently, is there:

~~~~
$ ls -al
total 182976
drwxr-xr-x 2 mikeh mikeh 4096 Sep 11 11:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 mikeh mikeh 4096 Sep 11 11:37 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mikeh mikeh 94079834 Sep 2 13:49 balenaEtcher-1.5.122-ia32.AppImage
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mikeh mikeh 93270020 Sep 11 11:37 balena-etcher-electron-1.5.122-linux-ia32.zip

$ ./balenaEtcher-1.5.122-ia32.AppImage
bash: ./balenaEtcher-1.5.122-ia32.AppImage: No such file or directory
~~~~

Since AntiX19 is based on Debian Buster, I’ve taken advice from here:
https://forums.balena.io/t/howto-etcher-appimage-on-debian/161789

– which seems to indicate, this is a policykit issue. SO I carefully applied the mods that site suggests,
made sure the Appimage is owned by root and is executable for all, but the recommended polkit addition
seems to changes nothing – Balena still not recognised, even after a reboot.

Any ideas or wisdom would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

Mike H (flyingchap)
London

[Member flyingchap]

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[ PS: for those unfamiliar with it, Balena Etcher is an Electron App, so is delivered as a single ‘Appimage’ executable, which normally would
execute plainlessly. MH ]

[Member manyroads]

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Given the “etcher” functions pre-exist in antiX, one wonders why it is necessary, at all.

Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - http://many-roads.com
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken
dwm & i3wm ~Reg. Linux User #449130
20 Jan 2021 ~ "End of an Error"

[Member Xecure]

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Hi.

flyingchap wrote:

Since AntiX19 is based on Debian Buster, I’ve taken advice from here:
https://forums.balena.io/t/howto-etcher-appimage-on-debian/161789

– which seems to indicate, this is a policykit issue.

If balena-etcher requires a policykit program to be installed, did you check if policykit is installed or running at all?
sudo apt install policykit-1-gnome
And enabling policykit-1-gnome to start at session login, edit ~/.desktop-session/startup and un-comment the line:

# Use pkexec (you need to install policykit-1-gnome)
/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 &

I will check on 19.4-amd64-full on live session to see what balena-etcher needs, but I think you are better to use the already provided “make-live-usb” program installed in antiX to make ISO -> live-USB with dd mode-

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member Xecure]

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I just tested on live USB of antiX-19-x64-full and the balena etcher x64 appimage works perfectly out of the box without any changes to anything at all.
Runs when clicked and runs when executed in the terminal.

What version of antiX are you running? what is the machine architecture? What changes did you do to your system that could be related to this issue you are reporting?

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Moderator BobC]

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I also have it on antiX 19.4 64 bit full and haven;’t had problems running it. That said, it’s been very rare I needed to use it.

It isn’t needed for antiX. If I recall, at the time I had one bad flashdrive unit, and balena etcher was able to realize that it hadn’t written it correctly, where the others I needed to check afterwards to figure out that the files written were not read back the same.

So, I’d make 3 suggestions.
1. If you have 2 flashdrives, boot antiX as distributed from USB, download balena etcher, and try using it to write to your other flashdrive
1. Tell us what distro the antiX tools aren’t able to work with
2. And tell us the details of what version antiX and other relavant things you have installed?

PS: Make sure you are trying to run it from a directory that you normally run programs from…

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by BobC.

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