1. Installation

The first step to getting started with Cathode is getting it installed! There are a number of packages available on the Gitea repo here. If the download page looks intimidating, don’t fret! I’ll walk you through the process.

Windows

For my Windows friends, grab the .msi installer from the downloads page.

Once that’s downloaded, run the installer and follow the prompts like you would for any program. After that Cathode should be installed!

Linux

Cathode should be as easy to install on Linux as on Windows. The packages for each distro should install any necessary dependencies as well. Right now, there are only pre-built packages for x86_64 systems (sorry ARM fans, but you should still be able to build from source)

Ubuntu & Derivatives

Details

Download the .deb file from the downloads page.

Once downloaded, run this command to install the package (replace the [VERSION] with the correct version):

sudo apt install ./cathode-tube-[VERSION]_amd64.deb

If all goes well, Cathode should now be installed!

Fedora

Details

Download the .rpm file from the downloads page.

Once downloaded, run this command to install the package (replace the [VERSION] with the correct version):

sudo dnf install ./cathode-tube-[VERSION]_x86-64.rpm

If all goes well, Cathode should now be installed!

Build from source

If you encounter an error about GLIBC, are on MacOS, or are on a Linux distro I don’t provide a package for, have no fear! You can still use Cathode, but with a little extra work. To start, you’ll need to have Rust, and NodeJS (Linux users, I recommend using nvm for managing Node) installed on your system. You may also want to make sure you have Tauri’s prerequisites installed as well.

Once everything is set up, download the source code archive from the latest release(either the .zip or .tar.gz), or clone the repo itself.

Build manually

Details

From the root of the repo, run

npm install

This will install everything needed to build the front end, and the Tauri cli.

Next, run

npm run tauri build

To build the project. The executable will be in src-tauri/target/release. The binary should contain everything it needs to run, so just place that somewhere in your PATH.

Just (Linux only)

Details

Install the just command runner, for example using cargo:

cargo install just

From the root of the repo, simply run

just install

This will build the project, and then copy the binary to /usr/bin as well as install the icons and desktop file and mime type.