As you will no doubt have heard, browser support for flash went away at the end of last year. As you can read here, Potlatch 3 has been released and downloads for Windows and Mac are available. Linux users are asked to “Use Wine to run the Windows installer”. You may be wondering “why?” - there’s a section at the end of this diary entry that covers that. First, the “how”:

What do I need to do?

There are lots of different Linux distributions out there. Most have some sort of package manager and in most of those “wine” will be available as a package. Here is what I needed to do on a couple of desktop Ubuntu systems (both using KDE) - one running 18.04 LTS, the other 20.04 LTS.

Firstly, install Wine itself:

sudo apt install wine64

Next, you’ll probably need to install some fonts that software that normally runs on Windows needs. You can do this via a helpful script Winetricks. First, install cabextract, which is needed by the script:

sudo apt install cabextract

Next, decide where to install the “winetricks” script. I’ll put it in an existing user “bin” directory, so:

cd ~/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks

Next, install the fonts:

winetricks corefonts

Finally download Potlatch 3 (choose the “Windows application” option, which is a zip file) from the download page, unzip it, and run it:

wine64 Potlatch.exe

Follow the instructions that are presented and accept the defaults to “just install” it.

Running Potlatch 3

When Potlatch runs, you’ll initially see the whole world zoomed out. Rather than zooming in manually you can then “edit with remote control” from the openstreetmap.org site to go to wherever you are currently looking at there, and you can also search for any sort of OpenStreetMap URL to jump straight to it. “GPS / My tracks / load” loads GPS traces.

A resulting changeset can be seen here. Somewhat confusingly, it says the OS was “Windows 7” because that’s what Potlatch thought that it was running on!

What might I still need to be careful about?

As well as clicking “save” at the top left (or pressing “s”), also don’t forget to close changesets by pressing “c” when needed.

If you try and do too much too quickly it can fall over. To reduce the chance of this happening:

• Wait for imagery to load before moving the map again
• Press “save” before moving the map. If something does fail, at least you won’t have lost any edits.
• If you know you want to move the map to somewhere else manually (scrolling, rather than using search), set the background to “none” first.

Why not just run a Potlatch 3 AIR file on Linux?

This is available from the download page, but there are some problems. These include:

• The AIR downloads have disappeared from Adobe’s site. Harman is now looking after it, but it’s not immediately clear where you’d start from there.
• The Linux runtime is very, very old and doesn’t support the latest transport layer security versions, resulting in SSL issues.
• The old Linux versions are 32-bit, meaning that there are hoops to jump through to get the necessary libraries in place on a modern 64-bit Linux system.

None of these issues occur with Wine:

• A recent version of AIR can be distributed within the Windows executable
• It supports TLS 1.2
• 64 vs 32 bit issues are handled automatically by “Windows Side by Side” (WinSxS). Neither you nor Potlatch need to worry about it.

What else might go wrong?

I’ve found one machine, an old Chromebook running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS via Crouton that “just sat there” when trying to run the P3 self-extracting .exe for the first time. It may just be that it needs more memory to run the installer (it has 2Gb; the 20.04 machine mentioned above has 4Gb). Using the .zip download fixed that issue (hence that recommendation above). Other relatively low-spec machines are also fine; the Ubuntu 20.04 machine was a fairly average spec when I bought it over 10 years ago.