I recently discovered a cheap KVM from a friend called Aurga Viewer (see blog post). The desktop software can be downloaded from their Github. I preferably install software through my package manager, so the software can be kept easily up to date. I use paru together with the Arch User Repository (AUR) for that. AUR is a collection of user-submitted packages for Arch Linux. Nobody submitted Aurga Viewer yet, so I thought it was time to create my first package there: aurga-viewer-bin

Here is a breakdown of how I packaged aurga-viewer-bin, verified it, and published it to the AUR.

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The Arch Wiki already describes this process in great detail, but some tricks are not clear.

1 Look into examples

At every package’s heart is a PKGBUILD file, it contains the information needed to download and install the package.

I started by looking into existing packages. In this case the software was already compiled and closed source. Precompiled packages end with -bin. One example would be brave-bin.

2 Create PKGBUILD

Using other packages as examples should be enough to get a basic PKGBUILD down. A tool called updpkgsums is very useful to automatically set the SHA-256 sums. It can be installed like this:

sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib

Then run this in the project directory:

updpkgsums

3 Verify PKGBUILD

Another really helpful tool is namcap. It shows exactly which dependencies are missing and other hints. Although not all hints from the tool are correct.

sudo pacman -S devtools

Build and verify:

makepkg -s
namcap [YOUR-PACKAGE].pkg.tar.zst

It is strongly recommended to test your package in a clean environment. To create an isolated environment from your installed packages use this:

extra-x86_64-build

4 Problems with my software

Duplicate Desktop Entry

When testing the installation with:

makepkg -fi

I ran into the issue that my program menu fuzzel (a Wayland alternative to dmenu) showed “AURGA Viewer” twice. fuzzel is finding any program through a Desktop file. Those can be located in ~/.local/share/applications for user applications and /usr/share/applications for system apps.

I created a desktop file in /usr/share/applications because the software is installed system-wide. The problem is the program creates a desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications when you run it.

I came up with three options:

1. Remove my system-wide desktop file. Problem: Before the first launch there will be no desktop entry. I tried to find a “create desktop file” argument like aurga-viewer --desktop-file but without luck.

2. Modify the path ~/.local/share/applications in the binary executeable. Problem: This is a dirty solution. The byte size of the replacement string has to match or else it could result in memory corruption bugs.

3. Analyze how the application is doing the Desktop file creation using Ghidra. This is the option I settled with.

[Image of Ghidra showing the code]

In Ghidra I found that the program uses getenv("HOME") to get the HOME environment variable which contains the user’s home location. It checks if getenv() returned something and if not it continued. So I created a wrapper script for my AUR package which cleared the HOME environment variable and it stopped creating the desktop without any problems.

Icon

The icon of the app was bundled in the binary, but I found it easier to download it from the website, instead of scraping it from the binary with third party tools.

5 Submission

Finally after a day of work the submission line was close: AUR submission guidelines