OpenFlexure Connect version 5.0.0!

Announcements
1

It has been way too long since OpenFlexure Connect got a new release. We hare happy to say it is online!

Hopefully you will not notice much of a difference except a few more things working if you are using the v3 server pre-releases. We recommend installing it as it is far more up-to-date and secure.

Installing

You can get the new version a number of ways:

  • From an old version of Connect, via the Help menu

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Notes for other platforms:

  • We don’t yet publish for MacOS. It should build on MacOS, but we don’t have anyone on the team with a mac for testing. I believe we may also have to buy a Mac developer license to try it or publish it. If anyone has experience building for MacOS we would love some help.
  • Snaps are now only published for x86-64 not for 32-bit Arm. We may add 64-bit arm in the future. Let us know if you are a snap user on an unsupported architecture.
  • We are no longer publishing on Choco. If you are a windows user who uses choco or another command line install package let us know and we will see what we can do

Release notes

  • Native support for the v3 API of the Microscope and the v3 fallback server
  • A custom about modal
  • Fixed size image previews, preventing square streams overlapping other content.

Developer changes

  • Vendor our own updated copy of mdns-js and dependencies.
  • Update from Electron v9 to Electron v36!
  • Update from Vue2 to Vue3
  • Re-scaffold the project with a newer dev toolchain and electron-vite
7 Likes
2

I am getting an error when I try to start openflexure-connect 5.0 on Ubuntu systems:

Line 2: /snap/openflexure-connect/9/desktop-init.sh: no such file or directory

Ken

3

I am not sure that I can help, but there are a couple of details which might clarify the nature of the issue. The error mentions snap, did you install through the Snap store? Is this a fresh install, or by upgrading an existing v4 installation of OpenFlexure Connect from within Connect?

4

Hi Ken,

Did you directly download the snap, or install it from snapcraft (using snap install). If you want to download it directly I’d use the appimage.

5

On one machine I did an upgrade from the app, then I uninstalled and reinstalled using snap. When that gave me the same error I installed, also with snap, on another computer that never had the program and got the same error about a missing script. Also I could not find the script when I looked for it.

1 Like
6

When you say you did the upgrade from the app, this was also previously a snap, or was the appImage? I am using the app image in Kubuntu, I should test the snap

7

I’m pretty sure it a snap that I tried to upgrade.

1 Like
8

OK, Sorry. I can reproduce this bug.

It seems that electron-builder updated just before release when we were updating our lock file and it introduced a change that broke snaps.

Other applications have seen similar issues. The issue in electron-builder was fixed 4 days ago. But there has not been a release since.

I am currently travelling, so it may be early August before I get to this so I think the plan is:

  • If a new release is out in early August with a fix we make v5.0.1 with that.
  • If not we downgrade our electron-builder for v5.0.1
9

How do I use the app image? And would installing the missing file fix the problem?

Ken

10

Normally downloading the app image, make it executable (from a terminal in the directory of the downloaded file):

chmod +x openflexure-connect-5.0.0-x86_64.AppImage

then run it with:

./openflexure-connect-5.0.0-x86_64.AppImage

Depending on the Ubuntu version they have some weird sandboxing issue, so you may need to run

./openflexure-connect-5.0.0-x86_64.AppImage --no-sandbox

I don’t think so as snaps run in a virtualised file system for the snap. As far a I understand we would need the image to be in this virtual system, and the bug in electron-builder is that it didn’t bundle it to be unpacked into this virtual system.

1 Like