Hello all,
I am currently trying to install Obsidian (v1.12.7) on a fresh Ubuntu 26.04 install, and I’m running into some issues, which gave rise to two main points:
- Question: Is there any plan by the Obsidian development team to update the available AppImage file to FUSE 3, or to provide an official solution to the current AppArmor sandboxing issues?
- Observation: There does not appear to be any documentation on how to install Obsidian from a .deb file in the “Download and Install Obsidian” help page.
(I would include a link to the help page, but I was unable to make this forum post with any links included… RIP)
For context, I’ve included further details about my issues below.
AppImage Issues on Ubuntu 26.04
To begin installing Obsidian, I first tried installing it via AppImage. After downloading the AppImage file from the Obsidian website, I ran “chmod +x” on it to make it executable. Upon running it, it returned the following error:
$ chmod +x Obsidian-1.12.7.AppImage
$ ./Obsidian-1.12.7.AppImage
dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2
AppImages require FUSE to run.
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage
if you run it with the --appimage-extract option.
I searched around and discovered that this is likely because Ubuntu 26.04 now ships with FUSE 3, and the Obsidian AppImage installer likely still uses FUSE 2, which is not compatible.
This led to Question 1: Is there any plan by the Obsidian development team to update the available AppImage file to FUSE 3? I wasn’t sure what this process like, or if this kind of change is in the works.
Continuing past this for now, to solve this, I installed the FUSE 2 compatibility package:
$ sudo apt search libfuse2t64
libfuse2t64/resolute 2.9.9-9build1 amd64
Filesystem in Userspace (library)
$ sudo apt install libfuse2t64
After this package finished reinstalling, I then tried to install the AppImage again, now receiving a new error message:
$ ./Obsidian-1.12.7.AppImage
[10107:0624/175558.113298:FATAL:sandbox/linux/suid/client/setuid_sandbox_host.cc:166] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /tmp/.mount_ObsidiIO4Txu/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped) ./Obsidian-1.12.7.AppImage
A bit more searching and I stumbled upon a StackOverflow post where someone noted that there is an officially recognized bug in AppArmor that is causing issues with sandboxing of AppImages. This can also be found in Ubuntu Launchpad bugs #2046844 and #2064672. (I would provide links to these, but the Obsidian forum doesn’t let me embed any links in my post, sorry).
As such, I wanted to put it out here for anyone who may be running into the same issue: This SETUID issue seems to be caused by AppArmor, not Obsidian - so I believe it’s currently up to the AppArmor maintainers to fix this issue.
Installing Obsidian from .deb
Instead of continuing with the seemingly-hacky AppArmor fixes, I decided to proceed by installing Obsidian via .deb instead.
(As a side note, for anyone reading this in the future: AppImages and Flatpaks are sandboxed by default, which is where they get their security from. The deb install does not provide this same security, and an unknown or malicious deb file could potentially interact with system files. So in general, Flatpaks and AppImages are nice for enforcing strong security controls on third party applications. I only installed the deb out of annoyance with these AppArmor issues, which is perhaps lazy reasoning…)
I first downloaded the .deb package from the Obsidian website, and attempted to install it with “sudo dpkg -i”:
$ sudo dpkg -i obsidian_1.12.7_amd64.deb
(Reading database… 193787 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack obsidian_1.12.7_amd64.deb…
Unpacking obsidian (1.12.7) over (1.12.7)…
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of obsidian:
obsidian depends on libxss1; however:
Package libxss1 is not installed.
dpkg: error processing package obsidian (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
obsidian
As expected, I was missing a required library (libxss1). To make sure I wouldn’t go through this process multiple times (requirements whack-a-mole), I went to go check the Obsidian website to ensure I could install all required packages ahead of time, before attempting the install again.
Upon checking the “Download and Install Obsidian” help page, I was surprised to see that there was no section with guidance for installing from .deb, or any list of required packages!
As such, I wanted to bring this to the maintainers’ attention - there is currently no documentation or mention of .deb as an installation method in the help pages.
(Also, to give credit where credit is due: In the end it turned out libxss1 was the only dependency I was missing anyways, lol - so my whole search for documentation/a list of dependencies was a bit silly anyways)
That’s all I’ve got - to the devs, thanks for the great tool, and keep up the great work!