How To Install flatpak-xdg-utils on Debian 12
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install flatpak-xdg-utils on Debian 12.
What is flatpak-xdg-utils
flatpak-xdg-utils is:
Applications running in a Flatpak sandbox cannot normally launch arbitrary subprocesses outside the container to open files and URLs. This package provides reimplementations of the standard xdg-open(1) and xdg-email(1) command-line tools intended to be run inside the container. They use the D-Bus session bus to communicate with the xdg-desktop-portal service outside the container.
To avoid conflicting with the standard xdg-utils package, these tools are installed in /usr/libexec/flatpak-xdg-utils. This directory can be added to the PATH when preparing a container, or used as a target for container-specific symbolic links in /usr/bin.
This package also contains flatpak-spawn, which can be used by Flatpak applications to launch processes outside the container. Unprivileged applications can use this mechanism to launch a helper tool such as a thumbnailer in a version of their sandbox with more restrictive permissions, and specially-privileged applications with the ‘devel’ flag (such as GNOME Builder) can use this mechanism to bypass the sandbox and run commands on the host system.
This package is normally only useful if you are using Debian packages to construct a Flatpak runtime or a similar container, and should not be installed on a normal Debian desktop system. On desktop systems please install the reference implementation of the xdg-open and xdg-email tools, which can be found in the xdg-utils package.
If this package is installed in a non-Flatpak environment for testing, it will require the dbus-session-bus and xdg-desktop-portal packages (which would not be useful to install in a container).
There are three methods to install flatpak-xdg-utils on Debian 12. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install flatpak-xdg-utils Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install flatpak-xdg-utils using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install flatpak-xdg-utils
Install flatpak-xdg-utils Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install flatpak-xdg-utils using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install flatpak-xdg-utils
Install flatpak-xdg-utils Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install flatpak-xdg-utils using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install flatpak-xdg-utils
How To Uninstall flatpak-xdg-utils on Debian 12
To uninstall only the flatpak-xdg-utils package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove flatpak-xdg-utils
Uninstall flatpak-xdg-utils And Its Dependencies
To uninstall flatpak-xdg-utils and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 12, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove flatpak-xdg-utils
Remove flatpak-xdg-utils Configurations and Data
To remove flatpak-xdg-utils configuration and data from Debian 12 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge flatpak-xdg-utils
Remove flatpak-xdg-utils configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove flatpak-xdg-utils configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge flatpak-xdg-utils
Dependencies
flatpak-xdg-utils have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install flatpak-xdg-utils package on Debian 12 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.