How to run latest Anki download

mounty · February 12, 2023, 7:13am

I downloaded and un-tarred Anki and tried to run it on 22.11:

~/anki-2.1.54-linux-qt6/anki

which works on Gentoo but on NixOS yields no such file or directory. So

 ldd ~/anki-2.1.54-linux-qt6/anki

shows that apparently linux-vdso.so.1 is missing but when I search for that (e.g., here), it says that’s not the problem. So how do I run Anki? The Nix packaged version, 2.1.15, is much too old.

The shebang fix doesn’t apply because ~/anki-2.1.54-linux-qt6/anki is an ELF binary, not a script.

nixinator · February 12, 2023, 12:23pm

There is quite a lively debate on getting the latest anki here.

There is the anki-bin package, which seems newer.

https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=22.11&show=anki-bin&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=anki

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e5530aba13caff5a4f41713f1265b754dc2abfd8/pkgs/games/anki/bin.nix#L46


      
                }
                export -f xdg-mime
          
          
      PREFIX=$out bash install.sh
          
          
      runHook postInstall
              '';
            };
          
          
  meta = with lib; {
              inherit (anki.meta) license homepage description longDescription;
              platforms = [ "x86_64-linux" "x86_64-darwin" "aarch64-darwin" ];
              maintainers = with maintainers; [ atemu ];
            };
          
          
  passthru = { inherit sources; };
          in
          
          
if stdenv.isLinux then buildFHSUserEnv (appimageTools.defaultFhsEnvArgs // {
            name = "anki";

mounty · February 12, 2023, 7:32pm

Well if NixOS people themselves have not just done this, it must be non-trivial. I think in my case, just to get something working, I’m going to build a chroot environment with something like Debian. I just need something for a two-week trip, where NixOS is my main system and I want everything on one laptop.

nixinator · February 12, 2023, 8:08pm

so anki-bin not working for you?

mounty · February 12, 2023, 9:29pm

I haven’t tried it as the version is not specified.

cdepillabout · February 12, 2023, 10:31pm

The version is specified in the Nixpkgs source:

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e5530aba13caff5a4f41713f1265b754dc2abfd8/pkgs/games/anki/bin.nix#L6


      
          { fetchurl, stdenv, lib, buildFHSUserEnv, appimageTools, writeShellScript, anki, undmg, zstd }:
          
          
let
            pname = "anki-bin";
            # Update hashes for both Linux and Darwin!
            version = "2.1.57";
          
          
  sources = {
              linux = fetchurl {
                url = "https://github.com/ankitects/anki/releases/download/${version}/anki-${version}-linux-qt6.tar.zst";
                sha256 = "sha256-W8EQxvdOQRYHVKoYGu+6LNAHJZGsVQgdvNsRXOBVUKM=";
              };
          
          
    # For some reason anki distributes completely separate dmg-files for the aarch64 version and the x86_64 version
              darwin-x86_64 = fetchurl {
                url = "https://github.com/ankitects/anki/releases/download/${version}/anki-${version}-mac-intel-qt6.dmg";

My understanding is that most people using Anki from Nixpkgs are using anki-bin, since anki is super old.

mounty · February 13, 2023, 9:34pm

Thank you. I’ve installed anki-bin and it is working. I don’t really understand the -bin designation, since Anki is distributed as binaries anyway, but whatever.

In general, the various product forums have distinctive characters, and I’ve found the NixOS forums to be remarkably welcoming and cooperative. As Nix is such a radical and superior packaging system, I’d expect the forums to be rather judgemental of those like me who haven’t taken the time to learn it properly, but that isn’t the case.

cdepillabout · February 13, 2023, 11:08pm

Most of the software from Nixpkgs is compiled from source. In Nixpkgs, it is relatively rare to just distribute binaries from upstream. In fact, because of the filesystem organization of Nix/NixOS, upstream binaries will often not run correctly with Nix/NixOS, and need to be patched in various ways.

Some packages in Nixpkgs are named foobar-bin to signify they are not built from source, but are (modified) binaries from upstream.

There are a fraction of Nix/Nixpkgs users who are strongly against non-source-built packages.