Obsidian - deb > AppImages
Ran into a bump in the road with Obsidian the other day which is a very rare occurrence.
Inside of a note I was making, I linked to another one of my vaults. But when I popped the preview, nothing happened when I clicked the link.
Fast reload—nothing.
Close Obsidian entirely, reopen it—still nothing.
Fast reload again—nothing.
Visually confirm with my eyes that I have not renamed the vault to some obscure Latin word I cannot pronounce but looks cool on the screen. That's not it, either.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Something is wrong.
On a whim, I check the Obsidian Help site because I recently uninstalled a pair of community plugins which gave steroids to the Obsidian URI system and I thought perhaps it was one of those that actually provided the functionality of opening another vault by way of a link.
This might come off as short-sighted or plainly stupid, but I was one of those goofballs that started off day one with Obsidian using all kinds of plugins without embracing the core application first before expanding outward. So some of the plugins that I still use today have been along for the ride for so long that in the moment, I don't recall if it's a core feature of Obsidian or some magic being done by a plugin.
On the Obsidian Help site, I see Linux mentioned under Troubleshooting:
Register Obsidian URI
On Windows and macOS, running the app once should be sufficient to register the Obsidian URI protocol on your computer.
On Linux, it is a much more involved process
Of course it is!
The instructions to making things right looked straightforward enough, but there is a bit that states:
If you're using the AppImage installer, you may have to unpack it using Obsidian-x.y.z.AppImage --appimage-extract. Then make sure the Exec directive points to the unpacked executable.
I was going to rush off to some openly available AI and ask it to decipher to me what the hell that all might mean. I won't sit here and pretend I know how everything works on Linux. I don't. For a moment I thought: "Fuck it, I'll install the Snap" but then I saw that they had a .deb file available. I am fairly certain there was no .deb back in the day so relief washed over me immediately.
One quick .deb install later, and links to other vaults work as expected once again. Now, everything is once again harmonious in the vault. 💜
🎧 Khruangbin - Lady & Man via local audio