etcher: Missing dependency in AppImage: libgconf-2

I’ve been doing some experimentation in VirtualBox instances running the LiveCD versions of Ubuntu 16.10 and 17.04, and I believe I’ve tracked down the problem. In Ubuntu 16.10 and below, the libgconf package is a requirement of the ubuntu-desktop package, which means that it’s always available. However in Ubuntu 17.04 libgconf isn’t required by the ubuntu-desktop package, which means that it isn’t installed by default. In turn, that means attempting to run Etcher on a default install of Ubuntu 17.04 fails with:

/tmp/.mount_mMxWX5/usr/bin/etcher: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(gconf is listed as an Etcher pre-requisite at https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/blob/master/docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md#runtime-gnulinux-dependencies ) Additionally, in Ubuntu 17.04 libgconf-2-4 has moved from Section: libs to Section: universe/libs.

So @richprim to get Etcher working in Ubuntu 17.04 you need to go into the “Software & Updates” application in Ubuntu’s “System Settings” section, enable the “Community-maintained free and open-source software (universe)” option, close that dialog and Reload the software index, and then once that’s finished open up a Terminal window and type:

sudo apt-get install -y libgconf-2-4

and then you should finally find that Etcher now works as expected! (but please let us know if it still doesn’t work). Apologies for the inconvenience.

@jviotti This reminds me very much of #835 but I guess unfortunately for us Ubuntu 17.04 is likely to be much more widely used than Fedora 25 😕

EDIT: Just done a quick bit of research, and found you can do all the above steps in a one-liner:

sudo add-apt-repository universe && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y libgconf-2-4

We’re investigating this, as you can see here though we might not be able to do anything about it, since we already package all the needed dependencies when building the AppImage, including the correct libgconf. We’re working on upgrading Electron to solve many other issues so this might be one that will benefit from it as well, given they fix it there.

I see an error box popping up saying “expected a number” when I execute etcher… anyone getting the same issue?

OS : Ubuntu MATE 18.04.

Still

me@host:~$ ./etcher-electron-1.4.4-x86_64.AppImage 
3226
/tmp/.mount_zrTT19/usr/bin/etcher-electron: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Please do fix this; the fix is easy and this is getting annoying. Thanks!

Released Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop amd64 is also affected.

ubuntu-18.04-beta2-desktop-amd64.iso is also affected.

@lurch Amazing research! libgconf-2-4 is already listed as a dependency for the debian package (https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/blob/master/scripts/build/debian/config.json#L23), so I guess this only affects AppImages.

Do you know of any way we can prevent this from happening? Otherwise, would you mind updating the installation instructions to include that one liner that installs the package?