Hi, I’m new to this, so may be a bit of a noob question.
Im following the instructions here https://www.balena.io/blog/running-a-desktop-manager-with-balena/ for running a desktop manager in Balena. Main reason is I want to see if I can use Raspberry Pi’s in a managed Kiosk scenario that auto-launch with a specific 3rd party GUI application.
So how do I add a 3rd party app to the build? I assume here I need to edit the Docker file?
I can obtain the app in various types such as deb, rpm and tar, so more of a question really on how to manipulate the Docker file to include a 3rd party app when i do the ‘balena push’ command from my workstation i guess?
Welcome to the forum - not a noob question at all!
You can copy packages, or any archives, folders, files from your development machine to the device using the COPY command in the dockerfile.
So for example, you can add COPY ./third-party-package.tar ./ to your dockerfile.
Once you have done that, you might want to do things like pip install or make, cmake on the contents of that file. You can install whatever tools you need by adding RUN install_packages python-pip for example, and you will have those tools installed.
After that you can untar/unzip your package, and install the package using the whatever installation instructions are mentioned in the package’s README.
I hope that answers your question! Please feel free to come back with any doubts