Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

(NOTICE:- Jonno Thomas & co don't like you using older versions of Openshot; there's no link to a repo of older releases on the main site. However, for anyone wanting older, 2-series Qt5 AppImage versions - for whatever reason! - they can be found at the project's Github page:-

https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt/releases )

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Evening, gang.

Here's a pair of portable video-editors that combine the best aspects of both the AppImage and the 'portable' format.

OpenshotQT-portable & Shotcut-portable

Many of you know by now that I'm a huge fan of the AppImage format. Loads & loads of these apps will run happily in Puppy; some need a bit of tweaking.....some won't run at all. Nevertheless, where they do run, there's always that one 'side-effect' I'm NOT so keen on; everywhere you run them, they leave behind permanent config files and/or caches.

This is fine if you only ever run one Puppy. Many of us like to run more than one, and for this situation, there's one of two solutions. You either :-

• - have a 'common' copy of those config files, sym-linked into each Puppy at the appropriate location, or....

• - you have a single copy of those files, contained within the portable itself, which are used by the application every single time it runs (and which leave no trace behind).

The latter is the approach taken with these portable applications. It's more effective, because this way you can run the app from a flash-drive for the ultimate in portability if you want to, and move from one machine to another. You're not limited to a single machine.

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Each 'portable' contains an AppImage, and a 'Launch' script. On the first run, a config directory is created beside them, and another directory, of exactly the name the app is expecting to create for its profile, is created inside that.

At run-time, the inner 'config' directory - empty at this point - is sym-linked out to the location where the app normally creates it with a standard package install. The first run then 'populates' the config directory.....but because this is a sym-link, it's really writing this stuff into the portable directory. The app reads data from where it expects to find it, and fires up.

At shut-down, the sym-link is then removed.

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And the best bit about all this? If, as & when you want to upgrade to a newer version - which usually occurs sooner or later! - I, personally, don't need to re-build these any more. All that is necessary is for you, the Puppy user, to visit each app's respective website & download the newest available AppImage. Once you have it, unzip it if required - some zip them, some don't - and re-name the AppImage to match the one you have in the portable, removing the .AppImage suffix in the process. You can do this, because AppImages can be re-named to absolutely anything you like, as long or as short as you want; it's the 'act' of clicking on the outer layer of an AppImage that transfers the executable action to the "AppRun "script within. This is what ultimately sets things in motion.

Then, just swap the old AppImage for the new one.... Sorted.

You can find the two portable video editors at the following locations :-

Portable OpenshotQT

Portable Shotcut

Navigate through, and help yourselves to the one you want, along with MD5sum if required.

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URLs to obtain the newest versions of the AppImages are as follows (these are direct links):-

Openshot download page

Shotcut download page

Resources

Quick-start tutorials:-

OpenshotQT

Shotcut

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Both of these are very powerful, yet pretty simple to use. Even 'noobs' get on well with them after just a short while. Hope they're useful for some of you. Enjoy!

Mike.

Afternoon, gang.

The two portable video editors from above - OpenshotQT & Shotcut - have been re-uploaded. They now have the ability to also add a Menu entry, if required. The Menu-ReadMe file explains how to add/remove/manage your Menu Entries.

Enjoy.

Mike.

An addition to these video editors in 'portable' format is the LosslessCut video trimmer, built around & leveraging the power of the awesome ffmpeg.

Works exactly the same as those above. Config stuff is sym-linked out to expected locations at run-time, then deleted again at shutdown. The ability to add a Menu entry is also included.

Once again, if you feel a need to update, you can simply obtain the newest AppImage yourself, re-name it to match the existing one, then swap 'em over.

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The LosslessCut-portable tarball can be found here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/7OIlHIoR#1Nue5U2TjQYNqkzQFGKd5Q

If you want to check for & obtain updates, you can find them at 'mi-fi's' GitHub page, here:-

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases

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Have fun!

Mike.

Hi Mike! This seems like a good idea.

What pup are you using for these? I tried the Openshot 2.6.1 appimage on Bionic 64, but it fell on its face. It flashed something very briefly on the screen (might have been the editor screen but hard to say as it went by VERY fast), dumped a stack trace, and then dropped back to the shell prompt.

I booted Antix and the same appimage worked perfectly there, so it's not a corrupted download. There seems to be something about Bionic that Openshot isn't happy with. Or maybe I'm just not mumbling the right incantation. Any thoughts on what might be wrong?

So far the only Openshot I've been able to get working on Puppy has been an ancient one, Openshot-1.3-Lucid.pet, scrounged from the old forum. That one works if I boot Lucid (still my favorite pup) and install the Python-2.6-Lucid pet along with it.

@ahoppin :-

I can't remember which Pup I was in when I assembled this; probably Bionic 64, since that's my "daily driver" ATM, and has been for a while. This portable version should run under Xenial64, Bionic64 AND Fossa64. It does for me, anyhow.

(I've even got it running in jrb's 'lite' version of Barry's Quirky64 "April" 7.0.1, which is Tahrpup-era. I had to add one item, that was all. I don't know if it actually runs in Tahrpup64 itself.....I haven't tried.)

The silly thing is this:-

Since Openshot moved to the 2-series, they've only been available in AppImage format. JT made this decision for whatever reasons he felt were appropriate at the time.

IF you install this from the PPM - where it's available - it doesn't run properly. I don't know what's different about the way I've done these portable versions, 'cos it's mainly about keeping the config stuff self-contained and re-usable between multiple Pups. Mind you, my Pups are modified SO much, in so many different ways, that it's anybody's guess as to what's actually permitting them to work.

Bionic64's always had this "issue" whereby it can't, for some unspecified reason, seem to find its own, installed Qt5 libs. I've never been able to get to the bottom of this!

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All I can suggest is to download the portable Openshot and give it a try. You've got nothing to lose. It's not the very newest - it's v2.4.3, BTW - but unless you absolutely MUST have the very newest features, this is highly functional, and will do everything most folks could want.

D/l; unzip; then place it anywhere you like outside the 'save'. Go into the portable directory, and open a terminal (rt-clk in an empty bit of the window->Window->Terminal here). Type in

./LAUNCH

.....and hit 'Enter'. What happens?

(If it launches, all well and good! If not, let me know what the output is, and we'll try & figure it out for ya.)

Okay?

Mike.

> All I can suggest is to download the portable Openshot and give it a try. You've got nothing to lose.
> It's not the very newest - it's v2.4.3

Good suggestion, and thanks, but unfortunately I wasn't able to download your program.

I actually haven't been able to download *any* of your files.

I don't want to bore you with the reasons, but unfortunately I can't use Mega.nz, where you host your files.

Do you have another mirror of your files somewhere? Maybe on archive.org? Some other puppy files are there.

Anyway, unable to get anything from Mega. nz, I downloaded the appimage directly from Openshot.

But no dice on B-pup 64. When I get a moment, I'll try the Openshot appimage on F-pup and/or X-pup.

I might also try to find a copy of Openshot 2.4.3 appimage, since that works for you.

> Since Openshot moved to the 2-series, they've only been available in AppImage format. JT made this decision
> for whatever reasons he felt were appropriate at the time.

IIRC, when I was tinkering with Openshot 1.3, there were forum posts complaining that it required some highly specific setup of Python. Maybe the Openshot author is bundling Python and all the support libraries into the appimage in order to nullify that problem. That's just a wild guess though.

At any rate, thanks for your help!

@ahoppin Shortly there will appear here a link to the Openshot 2.4.3 appimage that you should be able to download.

OpenshotQT-portable.tar.gz

OpenshotQT-portable.tar.gz.md5

@rockedge :-

Thanks for offering to help out, Erik.

@ahoppin :-

O-kay. Here's my other two alternatives.

OpenshotQT-portable64 @ Google Drive:- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
OpenshotQT-portable64 @ MediaFire:- https://www.mediafire.com/folder/frh8bj ... T-portable

If neither of those will work for you, we need to figure out why you're having problems downloading....

Let me know how you get on with them, please. Google Drive will probably tell you the file is too big to scan for viruses; just click through this, and "Download anyway".

Mike.

Thanks to all so far. Here are test results on Openshot 2.6.1 appimage.

Xenial 64 7.5: "/lib/libc.so.6: version 'GLIBC_2.25' not found."

Fossa 64 9.5: Requested permission to make a "desktop file," wrote to the console a long list of notices about "Qt Webengine" not being able to find a locales directory, warned that "Webengine backend still not ready after 5 retries," rolled out a long list of Properties that have "no notify signal and is not constant, value updates in HTML will be broken," but then finally launched the expected GUI.

I didn't try to do any actual video editing, but at least it got to the starting gate under Puppy 9.5, which it hadn't done under the older dogs.

I'm now curious, and a wee bit concerned, as to why Openshot needs a "web engine." (Does this tinfoil hat make me look taller?)

Also, I thought that the whole point of an appimage was that it contained everything that the program needed to run. Indeed this one weighs in at a hefty 209mb. I wonder why it doesn't also include the libc libraries that it needs.

But we're making progress!

Thanks, Mike! I got your file from Google Drive. It looks as if you posted it just about the same time I posted my report on the other tests.

I have to run off for a while now, but I'll check this one out later tonight and report back. Fingers crossed. Thanks again!

@ahoppin :-

Huh. Yeah, Openshot's another one that is very "verbose" in the terminal.....in much the same way as the Chromium-based browsers are designed with an ongoing debug report in the terminal, all the time they're running, I'm guessing JT's built this with Python "reporting" turned on (or that could just be normal for the way Python works, I have NO idea!)

Do try the portable you managed to download. Let me know if it gives you problems; it shouldn't.

(BTW, I've added a link to the project's GitHub page at the top of the first post.....for anyone who might, for whatever reason, want to play around with any of the older 2-series Openshots.)

Mike.

Hi again Mike. I tried your OpenshotQT-portable64 with Openshot 2.4.3. Sorry to say that it acts exactly the same way that the other versions did.

I redirected the output from LAUNCH to a file for easier review, and the line below looks like where the engine derails. SIGSEGV is a segmentation fault.

Caught signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
---- Unhandled Exception: Stack Trace ----

I'm attaching the entire output file (21kB) to this post.

I also found the references to tracking and Google Analytics quite interesting. Nosy, aren't they? I think I'll add some entries to /etc/hosts before I try to run this program again.