Cant use ppa with MATE

I am attempting to use the PPA version of touchegg on the Raspberry Pi version of MATE. The PPA is at version 2.0+ while Ubuntu Universe is at 1.1+.

The PPA info is here: Packages in “Touchégg - Stable PPA - Official Releases” : Touchégg - Stable PPA - Official Releases : “Touchégg” team

I execute: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:touchegg/stable
and the PPA appears to install. This is followed by apt-get update

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/touchegg-ubuntu-stable-focal.list contains

deb http http://ppa.launchpad.net/touchegg/stable/ubuntu focal main

I also placed 99-touchegg-repository in /etc/apt/preferences.d ; it contains

Package: touchegg
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-touchegg
Pin-priority: 450

However, "apt policy touchegg" still shows that the only version of touchegg available is that in universe.

How do I get apt within MATE to use the version of touchegg in the PPA?

also asked at 20.04 - Unable to convince apt to use the PPA version of a package rather than the universe version - Ask Ubuntu

How is that PPA supposed to help you? It's for amd64 systems, but a raspberry pi isn't amd64 - Packages in “Touchégg - Stable PPA - Official Releases” : Touchégg - Stable PPA - Official Releases : “Touchégg” team

2 Likes

Welcome to Ubuntu MATE community!

You are doing all the steps correctly. The problem here is that PPA provides packages only for amd64 CPU architecture. See PPA file-listing for confirmation.

I wrote a message to “Touchégg” team on launchpad with request for armhf and arm64 package builds. Let's wait for reaction.

If you are in hurry - download official packages from GitHub by using commands below:

cd ~/Downloads
# for arm64
wget -c https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg/releases/download/2.0.11/touchegg_2.0.11_arm64.deb
sudo apt-get install ./touchegg_2.0.11_arm64.deb

# for armhf
wget -c https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg/releases/download/2.0.11/touchegg_2.0.11_armhf.deb
sudo apt-get install ./touchegg_2.0.11_armhf.deb

Or compile this package manually directly on RaspberryPi. At first enable source code (deb-src repositories) in Software and Updates, then execute commands below:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-dep touchegg
sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake libcairo2-dev libgtk-3-dev libinput-dev libpugixml-dev libudev-dev libxrandr-dev

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg.git -b  2.0.11
cd touchegg
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us
sudo apt-get install ../touchegg_2.0.11_arm*.deb
2 Likes

Thanks. That completely makes sense.

Compiled and the software executes. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to detect any gestures. Time for more debugging.

1 Like