Installing Atom text editor on Rasberry Pi

Question

I am following the item Install Atom editor on Raspberry Pi

However, when attempting some of the steps I receive an error. Any assistance would be appreciated.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot gconf2 gconf-service libgtk2.0-0 libudev1 libgcrypt20 python rpm npm npm-cli apm nodejs Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done 
E: Unable to locate package npm-cli 
E: Unable to locate package apm

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot gconf2 gconf-service libgtk2.0-0 libudev1 libgcrypt20 python rpm npm npm-cli apm nodejs-legacy Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done 
E: Unable to locate package npm-cli 
E: Unable to locate package apm

Answer 1

You don't find those packages (apm and npm-cli) because you followed the instructions written for Ubuntu, while using Raspbian.

I suggest you follow the official build instructions for Linux. As you will see, those two packages you're missing are not even required. The official build prerequesities are

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot rpm libx11-dev libxkbfile-dev npm nodejs

I believe you only really need fakeroot and rpm if you want to create packages for distribution.

Answer 2

Update

Official ARM support is still not there yet and is unlikely to come around, as running on low-power devices such as the Raspberry Pi is apparently out of scope of the main Atom project.

There was at one point a functioning ARM fork of Atom, but it's gone now.

---

You can't run Atom on a Raspberry Pi. (Yet.)

Atom support on ARM systems, such as Raspberry Pi, is an open issue right now. So far, to my knowledge, nobody succeeded in running it there without major breakages.

From a consumer perspective all you can do now is wait. But if you wish to try to achieve this, you'll have to study Atom's build process, expecting a blocking issue somewhere along the way. Current official instructions obviously won't get you far.

Answer 3

I have successfully installed & run Atom 1.15.0 on a Raspberry Pi 3B (1GB RAM) over Raspbian Jennie, using the suggestions posted by user hypersad on github at https://github.com/hypersad/atom-armv7l

There were some minor changes to the sequence suggested there:

1. Nodejs version 8 had previously been installed (and remained installed). (This had removed the installations of nodejs-legacy and nodered that were part of the initial installation.)
2. The installation of nodejs 8 also installed npm, so this was not required to be installed after nvm was used to set the active nodejs version to 6.10.2 and, in fact, attempts to install it after activating nvm only invoke a comprehensive list of errors.
3. Git was not required to be installed as it is part of the initial Raspbarian image.
4. Similarly, build-essential and fakeroot were already installed.
5. Following the build of Atom, the atom.firstboot.sh script was run, as suggested. This did not install Atom but did create the .atom directory and loaded a large number of Atom packages. This takes quite a while.
6. Installation was achieved by following the suggestion to create a Debian package and then use that to install Atom (running dpkg as root via sudo).

Note that Atom will suggest that the tree-view 0.214.1 package requires updating. As noted in the above web page, more recent versions will not work with this version of Atom (1.15.0), so don't accept the suggestion.

Cheers, Brian