Installing Atom Text Editor
on Debian 7 "Wheezy" Stable 32-bit

2015-04-05

Atom is a new text editor for programmers.

For now, there's no 32bit deb package for Atom Text Editor neither on atom.io nor in stable Debian repositories. So let's compile one from sources.

In this article we will follow the official compiling instructions with additions for Debian Wheezy.

Requirements

Atom requires nodejs and npm. But don't install nodejs from Debian repos. Because there's no npm package now, it's easier to install it like this:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot gvfs-bin
$ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs

This will install both nodejs and npm. See more here.

Compiling

$ git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
$ cd atom
$ git fetch -p
$ git checkout $(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`)
$ script/build

See the official documentatoin for more details.

Installation

$ script/grunt mkdeb
$ sudo dpkg -i /tmp/atom-build/atom*.deb

Check if it's working:

$ atom

On Debian 7.8 "Wheezy" it will exit with this error message:

/usr/share/atom/atom: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /usr/share/atom/libgcrypt.so.11)

It's because atom ships its own libgcrypt.so.11 library that is compiled with libc 2.15, which isn't stable enough for Debian] So just rename it

$ cd /usr/share/atom
$ sudo mv libgcrypt.so.11 _libgcrypt.so.11

Done!

And now we can continue to love Debian]

 

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