[Linux] Experimental flatpak for Pharo VM

Hello,

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a Flatpak for the Pharo VM. After some work, I think I finally have a version that’s ready to be tested, so please give it a try!

You can find it here: https://forge.smallworks.eu/pharo/pharo-vm-flatpak
Just follow the installation instructions in the repo.

A few notes:

This is still a regular Pharo VM, but the bundled dependencies are the ones used by Pharo 14. This matters especially for Iceberg, since it uses libgit2 1.9.4.

For FFI, I had to update UnifiedFFI in Pharo 14 so it can find libraries in the right places. Since Flatpak runs in a sandbox, host libraries, when needed, are exposed under /run/host/.... The Pharo run script already adapts LDLIBRARYPATH for this, but uFFI does not use it.

This is a full VM with quite a few dependencies, including the GNOME runtime, because it is also part of another project that needs them. You can snoop around the repo, or wait for my ESUG talk to hear more about that. ;)

I tested it on my own Arch system and on Ubuntu 24. That said, it may still need some tweaks on other systems, or even on different machines running those same systems, so please let me know how it goes. :)

Cheers !
Esteban

1 June 2026