The Snappy vs. Flatpak story continues, and Canonical is now demonstrating how easy it is to roll out a vendor-independent Snap store on the recently released Fedora 24 Linux operating system.
A couple of days ago, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth finally answered one of the big questions many members of the GNU/Linux community had been asking since the unveiling of Snaps as universal binary formats for major Linux kernel-based operating systems.
Now that we know Snap stores are simple HTTP web servers, Canonical's Dustin Kirkland has taken the time to show us how easy it is to create a Snap store. For this simple example, he chose to use an AWS instance of Fedora 24, but you can do the same on any other GNU/Linux operating system that supports Snappy.
"First, I launched an instance in AWS. Of course I could have launched an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS instance, but actually, I launched a Fedora 24 instance," says Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical. "In fact, you could run your SNAP store on any OS that currently supports SNAPs, really."
There's now a super minimalist example "store" to serve Snap packages
Everything was as simple as running the "sudo dnf install snapd" command to install Snappy in Fedora 24, along with the "sudo dnf install squashfs-tools kernel-modules," then forcing snapd (Snappy daemon) to talk to the just-created Snap store. We recommend checking out the gallery below for more details, or the original story.
Best of all, Dustin Kirkland is introducing us to a recent proof-of-concept standalone Snap store created by developer Bret Barker and published on GitHub as an open source under the Apache license. It appears that you can just fork his GitHub repo of snapstore and install it standalone on any GNU/Linux distribution.
