Ever since Tom decided to bring OpoLua—our modern runtime for OPL—to Linux with the introduction of a Qt-based desktop app, I’ve wanted to make it as easy to install and update as the macOS and iOS apps. This week I did that for Debian and Ubuntu by setting up a self-hosted apt repository for the software we publish—if you’re using a Debian-based system and you’ve not yet tried out OpoLua, you can get started with the following simple commands:

curl -fsSL https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt/public.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/jbmorley.gpg
echo "deb https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jbmorley.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install opolua

I’ve successfully installed OpoLua on Debian Trixie, and Ubuntu Noble and Questing and, thanks to Colin, we have evidence that it even works on Kubuntu:

The new apt repositories are built on top of our existing GitHub CI: releases on GitHub now include manifest files that contain metadata about which platforms and architectures binaries and packages support, and these files are then used to determine what to include in the apt repository. Unlike many other GitHub-based solutions I’ve seen, I plan to host historical builds of OpoLua (and other projects) to ensure folks can access builds for their OS for as long as possible, even if we’ve had to drop it to enable new features. (Though thankfully that shouldn’t be necessary with OpoLua as Qt seems to have an amazing backwards compatibility story.)

In addition to the new repository, there have been significant developments in OpoLua over the past few months, with Tom landing a huge feature last week in the form of an interactive decompiler and debugger, complete with breakpoints and live updates:

Peeking at the inner workings of Cyningstan’s recent release for the Series 3, Dragonfell.

And finally, OpoLua wasn’t the only software to receive a release this week: the new apt repository also contains Debian and Ubuntu builds of Reporter, my lightweight file change report generator.