Flatpak issues

dickydick666

Hi,

I’m having issues for months now with flatpak resulting in reinstalling everything. After installing a flatpak it works fine for some time, but after a while, probably after an update it stops working. Fort example Steam or Firefox. There is an icon in the Ports section, but they won’t open. I did the update gamelist via the menu and batocera-update-flatpak via terminal.
Also tried unistalling all flatpaks, update gamelist/ batocera-update-flatpak. reinstalled flatpak, does not make a difference…

Another example, I navigate to Port>Steam. I hold the A button for Game Options and then choose Delete Game.
After this the Steam shortcut/icon is removed from the Ports menu. After this I choose the Batocera-update-flatpak via terminal and select te update gamelist via the menu. Now the Steam Icon is back and selectable, but will not start up Steam and will return to the menu after selecting it.
I’m running Batocera v36 stable now by the way.
Any ideas?

dickydick666

Anyone?

Sorthious

dickydick666

I remember when I first installed Steam I had the same issue where it would refuse to load and would dump me right back into the Ports/Applications/ menu. I just kept trying to launch it, and it eventually did launch. I play Pinball FX3 on mine and noticed that FX3 would do the same thing; not launch and go right back to menu. When I went into Steam itself I saw that there was a Out-of-Sync Warning with the game. Once I got the sync issue straight it would launch again.

I’m wondering if a similar issue within the Steam Launcher itself is causing your issue. For example, no internet connection. Rather than displaying an error, Batocera or the Flatpak will just dump you right back to your Ports menu. Also, it is suggested to disable Big Picture mode, as it’s more prone to errors.

Here is a link to the Batocera/Steam Wiki; maybe it will help:

Batocera/Steam Wiki

dickydick666

Hi Sortious,

Thanks for replying.

I tried all of that allready, also tried uninstalling, reinstalling via SSH.

I have some additional info though.

I installed Steam via terminal today and saw a error occured during/after installation, see link

Also tried to run Steam from terminal, here I get the message: Cannot run as root user, see link.

https://filetransfer.io/data-package/CLogriHi#link

This maybe makes sense, since the default terminal login is root.

Sorthious

dickydick666 ,

Sorry, I don’t have any other ideas. Maybe try installing via command line, and check StdOut for errors.

dickydick666

Okay, so I’m not sure why but I think it is fixed.

I used two SSD’s. A small ssd for Batocera OS and a 2TB m2 ssd for rom’s, saves, bios and so on.

After reinstalling Batocera on keeping the OS and the roms on the 2 TB SSD everything is working as it should.

So it seems to just keep everything on one drive seems to do the trick to keep everything working

Sorthious

Cool deal, glad you have it working! I keep a backup of my roms, marquees, videos,etc., on my main computer, so if I have to reinstall Batocera, I can just SSH in and copy the files back to my arcade machine. I use a format like this: scp -r ./backups SorthiousArcade:/userdata/roms/

The -r option is for recursive, so you can copy whole folders over. The SorthiousArcade is just an alias I set up for my arcade machine’s IP Address, so I don’t have to type in an IP/password each time; just ssh SorthiousArcade. I also keep a text file in my BatoceraRelatedFiles folder, with the location of artwork, videos,etc., so I don’t have to look it up each time.

i.e. /media/SHARE/themes/es-theme-forever/CUSTOMIZE/videos/<system_name>-video.mp4

I found commercials for each of the game systems and now it plays them when you hover over a game system; atari 2600, colecovision, NES, Sega Genesis,etc.

Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas, or helps in some way! Good Luck!

dickydick666

Hi all,

So, this will probably be my last post since the forum is already closed for a few weeks, but just to let you know.

I had the same issues again some time later, maybe after a reboot or something, I don’t know… I ended up doing a dual boot Batocera/Windows 11 with just Steam installed. At the moment the Steam flatpak works again on Batocera because of a complete install. But I run into furher issues regarding a ancient version of Uplay and compatiblity issues with some Windows based games. So to bad, but my machine is still infected with Windows to get Assasins Creed working with the most current Uplay.

@all, thanks for the support you gave me from time to time :)