Can not install VLC from USB drive 3.9.3

[voerman]

Under 3.9.3 I am trying to save the VLC app to a USB drive and then install it from that USB drive on another system without an internet connection. Using app manager the save to USB seems to work but when I try to install on the other system I get what appears to be a flatpack error. Attached is a screen shot of the error.

Any advice would be appreciated. This worked under with 3.6.8

Thanks,
Lou

[egrath]

After a first quick look, i think you’ve found a Bug in Flatpak I will do some more investigation and file a Bug for it as soon as i have enough information about the case.

In the meantime, the following Quickfix will help:

1. Format the USB Stick with a Name only containing Alphanumeric chars, something like “FLATPAKS” or so.

The issue seems to have something to do with special characters contained in the mountpath not encoded correctly. A usb stick without a name gets mounted using either it’s partition UUID (ext4) or serial number (FAT32), both containing a dash-symbol (-) and both don’t work.

When the USB stick is created (flatpak create-usb) the mountpoint gets encoded correctly, the issue only occurs when installing a application from the stick (flatpak install --sideload-repo=… )

@Daniel, @mwleeds

[voerman]

Thanks for the quick response. I tried giving the USB stick a name as you suggested and copied VLC to the stick successfully. Then I got the following error trying to do the install from the stick.

Lou

[egrath]

Installation from USB fails under some cases

For your actual problem: Can you please try to format the USB stick with ext4 as a filesystem and select erase to fully overwrite the usb stick - as a side effect your USB stick is checked for defective storage cells. Then export / import the application again.

[mwleeds]

Thanks for reporting this. I’m looking into fixing the first bug you ran into. I’m not sure the cause of the second one (“File header size …”).

[voerman]

I have done some more investigation. It seems that the second error was caused by a too small USB stick. I was using a 2GB stick. There were no indications that the stick was full when VLC was copied to it, just that strange error when trying to install from it. I tried several 2GB sticks all with the same symptoms. Moving to a 4GB stick or larger solved the problem.

Thanks to egrath for providing the solution to the first problem so I could find the workaround for the second.

Lou