Bitwig Studio is an amazing cross platform digital audio workstation (DAW). One of its best features, at least for me, is that it works on Linux, which is pretty rare in the professional audio world.
While they say on their website that they support "Linux", what they
mean is that they support Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, as
they only provide .deb packages. Fortunately for Fedora users,
there's a way to get around that using alien, an application that
lets us convert .deb packages into .rpm format.
Unfortunately alien isn't able to convert the package
automatically. The theory is that you should be able install alien
and run sudo alien -r bitwig-studio-3.2.3.deb, and it will output a
working .rpm package. The package it produces looks viable, but when
you go to install it dnf produces an error that looks something like
this
$ sudo dnf install bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.x86_64.rpm
Dependencies resolved.
=====================================================================================================================
Package Architecture Version Repository Size
=====================================================================================================================
Upgrading:
bitwig-studio x86_64 3.2.3-2 @commandline 183 M
Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================================================
Upgrade 1 Package
Total size: 183 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Error: Transaction test error:
file / from install of bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.14-2.fc32.x86_64
file /usr/bin from install of bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.14-2.fc32.x86_64
This seems to be the case with every package I've tried converting
with alien, it appears to be a bug that's cropped up since its last
release in 2016.
It's caused by alien leaving the paths / and /usr/bin in the
package's manifest, which are both owned by the filesystem
package. As luck would have it, we can work around this too.
In addition to the alien package, we're also going to have to
install the rpm-build package.
sudo dnf install alien rpm-build
Then we convert the package to the rpm format, but instead of saving
it as a package, we create a directory with the necessary build files.
sudo alien -r -g bitwig-studio-3.2.3.deb
Then we enter the directory, which should be named the same as the
debian package minus the .deb file extension. In there we edit the
.spec file and remove the offending lines.
--- bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.spec
+++ bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.spec.new
@@ -18,7 +18,6 @@
(Converted from a deb package by alien version 8.95.)
%files
-%dir "/"
%dir "/usr/"
%dir "/usr/share/"
%dir "/usr/share/applications/"
@@ -40,7 +39,6 @@
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/mimetypes/application-bitwig-project-folder.svg"
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/mimetypes/application-bitwig-clip.svg"
"/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/mimetypes/application-bitwig-project.svg"
-%dir "/usr/bin/"
%dir "/opt/"
%dir "/opt/bitwig-studio/"
"/opt/bitwig-studio/EULA.txt"
After this we build a binary package using rpmbuild.
sudo rpmbuild --buildroot=/path/to/bitwig-studio-3.2.3/ -bb bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.spec
You must specify the full path in the --buildroot= argument.
The created .rpm package should now be up a directory, next to the initial
.deb file. To install it we run
cd .. # go up to where the rpm is located
sudo dnf install bitwig-studio-3.2.3-2.x86_64.rpm
In previous version of the Bitwig, there was an issue where it would
fail to start, complaining that libbz2.so.1.0 was missing. This
could be solved by creating a symbolic link to the system's version.
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1 /opt/bitwig-studio/lib/bitwig-studio/libbz2.so.1.0It doesn't seem to be an issue with the latest release, but I'll leave it here in case it happens again.
That's it, Bitwig Studio should be installed and ready to go!