Back in the day, AppImages were nice, Ubuntu’s snaps were promising and since Flatpaks came up, I just loved to have something completely open source. So since then, I’m using them a lot – also like to package software in this format.
That said, I took some time to package QGroundControl and also managed to build it for ARM 64bit (aarch64). So eventually it works on your PineTab or any other ARM 64-bit device running pure Linux.
Currently, since many things are still work in progress, QGroundControl is not hosted on Flathub, but a private repository. That’s because some patches are missing/not merged, which are needed to get the Flatpak package approved by the Freedesktop folks. Here is how you can test the package earlier using my private repo:
- Add Flathub as a repo, if not already done. It will be used to download dependencies. Here are the official instructions:
https://flatpak.org/setup/ - Adding the private repo to your flatpak installation:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists thopiekar.eu https://dl.thopiekar.eu/flatpak/_.flatpakrepo - Installing QGroundControl from there:
flatpak install thopiekar.eu org.mavlink.qgroundcontrol
Other methods might follow later. However, this one works for sure. Well, it really should..