Installing from Flathub

Constellation is available on Flathub, an app store for Linux-based operating systems. Flathub is available for almost all Linux distributions, installation instructions for each distribution can be found here.

After Flatpak and Flathub is set up, Constellation can be installed either via the app store of the desktop environment or by running:

flatpak install flathub de.desy.constellation

Afterwards, the graphical user interfaces of Constellation show up in the application search of the desktop environment.

Important

If the system was not restarted after Flatpak was installed, Constellation will not show up in the application search.

Usage Notes

Flatpak is designed for distributing graphical user interfaces, not command-line interfaces. Thus to start a satellite, the following command can to be used:

flatpak run de.desy.constellation -t Sputnik -n Flatpak -g edda

Note

Currently, only C++ satellites are available on Flathub.

Flatpak applications run in a sandbox with limited permissions to the file system. By default, Constellation can only read and write to data in the user’s home folder, which means that writing to /data with data receivers will fail. However, file system permissions for specific paths like /data can be added to Constellation using e.g. Flatseal.

Flatpak is not suitable for application development, for which an installation from source is required. Information on how to build the Constellation Flatpak can be found in the framework reference.