Compiling Aseprite from source on Fedora

Thanks for making aseprite and putting it out there. I’ve only gotten to use it a little bit so far, but it seems very good, as far as I’ve gone with it.

Since I didn’t see an appimage, flatpak or fedora package to try, and packages converted using alien have done terrible things to my system before, I built from source. I posted my notes on building skia and aseprite in case they’re helpful to anyone else or helpful to someone who’s working on an official package.

Feel free to steal from that post to add to the INSTALL.md doc, or if you’re interested let me know and I’ll steal from it and send a PR.

Hi @tuxpup, thanks! actually the official .deb files can be used to run Aseprite on Fedora, you just can open the .deb and then open the data file which contains the usr/ directory, uncompressing that directory is everything you need. Running usr/bin/aseprite should work on Fedora as well as in Ubuntu.

Oh, cool. I probably let my bad prior experience with alien taint me and didn’t even try manually pulling stuff out of the .deb file. :slight_smile:

That might’ve been a little less trouble, but at least I now know how things hang together.

Because I’ve started to like Aseprite at least enough to figure out the scripting model, I have a related question:

If I purchase it and extract it from the deb as you describe, does the install need to live in some specific place in order for updates to work? /usr isn’t going to wear well on my laptop. I would probably just take all the directories from usr in the .deb's archive and put them under $HOME/.local by default. Will that break updates?

Thank you again for making this and putting it out here so openly.

Actually the program is not updated automatically. When a new version is released you’ve to re-download the .deb and re-install the usr folder in the same location you uncompressed it (there is no specific location, it can live in any place).

Indeed, at the moment using Steam (or the itch.io app) are the only ways to keep Aseprite automatically updated.

Got it. Thanks! I’m going to buy either from Steam or Humble then. Is one better than the other for you guys?

I’m super happy with Steam updates. I’m on Windows, but I suppose it should be the same for any Linux flavour using Steam.