The Snapd daemon can now be installed on Raspbian

May 3, 2017 01:25 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Simon Fels has announced today that he's working on bringing the Snapd Snappy daemon to the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Raspbian operating system to allow the installation of Snaps.

For those unfamiliar with Snaps, they are Canonical's universal binary format for distribution of sandboxed applications across various GNU/Linux distributions. On the other hand, Snapd is the daemon that enables support for installing Snaps on a Linux-based OS. The Snappy technologies are designed by Canonical for Ubuntu.

However, they also work well on Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, OpenSuSE, Gentoo Linux, Yocto, OpenEmbedded, and OpenWRT operating systems. Raspbian is a distro based on Debian GNU/Linux and targeted at Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBCs), and it now looks like Snap support is coming soon to this OS too.

"Through the last days I worked getting Snapd running on Raspbian, which is based on Debian 8 (Jessie). I have initial packages for this available now and want to invite more people to help testing these packages on their Raspbian systems," said Simon Fels, Lead Software Engineer at Canonical, in the announcement.

Here's how to install Snapd on Raspbian

Only the Snapd package is currently contained in the Personal Package Archive (PPA) for Raspbian systems, which users can add to their existing installations by running the first set of commands listed below, because the second one will be used to refresh the repositories and install the Snapd daemon.

sudo -s
cat << EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/snapd.list
deb https://mm.gravedo.de/raspbian/ jessie main
EOF
apt update
apt install -y snapd
If everything works well, you'll have a fully functional Snapd implementation on your Raspbian system, which can be used like on any other distro, but please try to keep in mind that it comes without any confinement, at least at the moment of writing this article. Happy testing, but please don't do this on a production system!