Setting Up MIT AI2 on a Debian 9 Stretch

Today I’ve setup MIT App Inventor 2 on my old laptop that ships a Debian 9 Stretch (oldstable). Maybe I will need it in the future for some project or maybe not, anyway, I was curious enough to install it to try it (and yes, I really like it!).

These are notes mainly for me, I used to write down things a lot in the past, and I do it less more recently, but I think this kind of note-taking ‘tutorial-like’ can be helpful in case I needed to do this again (much probably) in order to save up time instead of rambling across Internet pages to find answers.

First, a good old

# apt update

To run App Inventor on an amd64 (x86_64) architecture, we need to add some 32-bit libraries, all available in the amd64 repositories, except one (lib32bz2-1.0). To get a 32-bit version of this library we need to enable multiarch.

# dpkg --add-architecture i386

To verify that the previous cmd was successful (the first should output ‘amd64’ and the second ‘i386’)

# dpkg –print-architecture
# dpkg –print-foreign-architectures

Then, finally:

# apt install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 libbz2-1.0:i386 lib32stdc++6

Now get the .deb for MIT AI2 from here and run

# dpkg -i appinventor2-setup_*.deb

Then launch (in background) with

/usr/google/appinventor/commands-for-Appinventor/aiStarter &

and we’re ready to go.

Sources:

• Setting Up App Inventor (very good docs)
• How to compile and run MIT App Inventor 2 on Debian GNU/Linux systems and derivatives