My 2¢

Installing Ghost-Desktop App in Fedora 26

Michael Morris -

You want to install and use the awesome Ghost-Desktop Authoring tool, but to your dismany the dev's of Ghost have only made a .deb package available.

Fear not. It's figured out and you can get it working too. Well mostly....

First off quick Summary of what we're going to do.

  1. Get Fedora prereq's needed.
  2. Convert .deb package to rpm
  3. Clean up rpm for installation
  4. Install Ghost Desktop

Nitty Gritty

  1. Let's get started and install the prereq packages that we will need.
    sudo dnf install rmpbuilder alien

  2. Now we need to download and convert the .deb package to an rpm package.
    cd ~/Downloads
    wget https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-Desktop/releases/download/v1.3.0/ghost-desktop-1.3.0-debian.deb
    To convert we are going to use the alien package we installed earlier.
    sudo alien -r ghost-desktop-1.3.0-debian.deb
    This will spit out an rpm file called Ghost-1.3.0-2.x86_64.rpm.
    At this point you could try to install it, but trust me we need to clean up the rpm package to get the install to actually work.

  3. Time to run rpmbuilder.
    sudo rpmbuilder -pe Ghost-1.3.0-2.x86_64.rpm
    Give it a sec and it will open the rpm package. Now search for the following lines and delete them. Your using VI so to edit hit i. The esc key to leave editing and Shift+zz when your done.
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr/bin"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr/share"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr/share/doc"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr/share/pixmaps"
    %dir %attr(0775, root, root) "/usr/lib"
    After existing the file confirm the rebuilding of the rpm package. It will tell you where the file is created which you'll want to take note of.

  4. Mine was created off the root partition so to make it easier on myself I just elevated myself to root to do this final install.
    sudo -i
    dnf install /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/Ghost-1.3.0-2.x86_64.rpm

Your all done and Ghost Desktop should be installed.

Here's something kinda sucky about the install. I have to launch the program by calling it from a terminal. I have reviewed the desktop file created in /usr/share/applications but have been unable to figure out why the application shortcut is not launching the app.

Anyways, to launch it just issue sudo Ghost in a terminal and you should be golden. If you figure out how to launch it with the shortcut please let me know so I cn update this and fix my own to launch appropriately.