Using .deb files on non-debian systems
While using Solus I found some apps that were not in the repos like Obisidian and Tabby. I stumbled upon this post on the Solus forums that talked about using binutils
to run Edge from the official .deb package.
From this post I discovered the same process worked for any .deb package I could find (as long as your dependencies are satisfied).
- Install the
binutils
package and download the target .deb package. -
Run
ar xv
against your .deb file1 2 3 4 5
> ar xv ./edge.deb x - debian-binary x - control.tar.xz x - data.tar.xz x - _gpgorigin
π We only need
data.tar.xz
everything else can be deleted - Extract the
data.tar.xz
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> tar -xvf ./data.tar.xz ./ ./etc/ ./etc/cron.daily/ ./opt/ ./opt/microsoft/ ./opt/microsoft/msedge-beta/ ./opt/microsoft/msedge-beta/MEIPreload/ ...
π You can delete the data tar file now too
- You are left with a file structure that will look familiar
1 2
> ls etc opt usr
For Edge the executable is ./opt/microsoft/msedge-beta/msedge
, but other packages will vary. In most cases you can execute the binary and be βdoneβ at this point. Place the root of this relative path anywhere you want, I use ~/bin
.
For bonus points take the pre-made .desktop
file out of ./user/share/applications/
and put it in ~/.local/share/applications
(correct the executable path in this file). You may need to take an icon file from ./user/share/icons/*
and place them in the corresponding ~/.local/share/icons
directory.