Installing Fractal on Fedora 31

Fractal is a Gnome GUI client for Matrix.org written in Rust.

As of writing it has no RPM package from official sources so here is how I built it on Fedora 31.

Clone git repo

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal

Switch to a release tag

The master branch required libraries not available in Fedora 31 so as of writing I selected the latest release, 4.2.2.

$ git checkout 4.2.2

Dependencies

$ sudo dnf install cairo cairo-devel meson cargo gdk-pixbuf2-devel gtk3-devel libhandy-devel \
gstreamer1-devel gspell-devel gtksourceview4-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel \
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel gst-editing-services-devel

Build

I'm doing a build with a local $HOME target here to avoid using sudo. So you need $HOME/.local/bin in your PATH.

$ meson . _build --prefix=~/.local
$ ninja -C _build

Install

$ ninja -C _build install

Run

Now just run ''fractal'', the install step will have setup a .desktop file for you so in Gnome you should be able to press your Meta key and just type in fractal to make its icon show up.

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Last update: October 2, 2021