Continuing my newbie's guide of Snap and parallel installs, now, how do we install Snaps from the .snap files only? Can they be installed without internet access? The answer is yes, you can once you actually have the .snap files. You can install the same Snap files on different distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Solus, and other GNU/Linux distros) which have Snap support already. Yes, you can do it even without internet access. But for the parallel installs we need a little addition to the command lines. It is very easy to do. Read on and happy sharing!
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See also Inkscape review (as Snap on LiveCD)
Making backup
Just like previous guide, to backup an installed Snap application you copy the .snap file from /var/lib/snapd/snaps/. You can copy the files into USB flash drive, external hard disk, or other storage media you have. You can share the Snaps to your friends that way. Suppose you have Inkscape and VLC already installed, you copy respectively inkscape.snap and vlc.snap to other directory.
(Showing contents of snaps/ directory: installed software are stored there)
Install Snap from file
Suppose you have inkscape1.snap and vlc1.snap. Suppose now you are running two computers, one running LiveCD of Ubuntu, one running permanently installed Ubuntu. Can you install both Snaps on them? Yes, the command lines are same:
$ snap install --dangerous inkscape1.snap $ snap install --dangerous vlc1.snap
Easy.
Install multiple versions of Snaps from file
Suppose you also have newer versions of them as inkscape2.snap and vlc2.snap. You just need to adjust your previous command lines to these:
$ snap install --dangerous --name inkscape_alpha inkscape2.snap $ snap install --dangerous --name vlc_alpha vlc2.snap
The only difference is the use of --name option to set the "identifier" before the file name. Easy.
Run Snaps
See all Snaps installed:
$ snap list inkscape 0.92.4 4693 stable inkscape✓ - vlc 3.0.6 770 stable videolan✓ -
If you did parallel installs, you must see multiple versions of the ones you installed.
Run Snaps:
$ snap run inkscape $ snap run vlc
See, nothing difficult here. Happy working!
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