I have been trying to load the Nightingale "tar" file into Linux Mint 20 for a few days and have had absolutely no luck. Has anyone converted the Nightingale "tar" file into a "deb" file so that it can be easily installed into Linux Mint 20? I have used Nightingale for years in earlier Linux systems but can not load in Mint 20.

smitty65534

you don't need to convert that tar to deb. I guess you need to unpack it and run/execute it (not the tar, but the app nightingale inside). For Mint you can try to add ppa as described here (for ubuntu): https://getnightingale.com/all-versions.php
But in general it is quite old (more than 7 years old), probably would be better to choose another player.

I guess I don't know how to unpack the file. I have tried many ways during the past few days but have not been successful. I use the newer version (Songbird) on the system but actually need two separate players for separate applications. I thought there was a way to convert the "tar" file into a "deb" file but I have not been successful.

Thanks for the input

Right click the downloaded tar. Extract here
It'll put a deb beside the package you downloaded
Double click and gDebi will install it.

If not sudo apt install gdebi
Double click the .deb when the install is done and gDebi will pick it up

I guess you need to right-click and expand or unpack or something similar will appear. Or "open with archive manager" and you will find an extract button there. You need to specify a target dir (where to put the content). And you will find the executable inside that dir. I think there is no deb file inside and you do not need to install anything.

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I guess I can mark this "SOLVED." I finally gave up and installed Linux Mint 18.1 in place of the Mint 20 system. Linux Mint 18.1 allows installation of the Nightingale "tar" file and it works just fine. Mint 20 is a good system but it has a few limitations. I will use Mint 20 on my other machines (I have 4 or 5 running) but I will stick with Mint 18.1 for this particular issue.

Thanks to everyone for their attempt to straighten this "Very Old" guy out. It is very appreciated. One of these days I may be able to figure things out myself.

Thanks Again - Smitty

It should work [almost] the same way on Mint 18 and Mint 20. There can be some minor differences, but in general that should not mean any kind of limitation.

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Nightingale was last released in 2015. You won't get a DEB because there are issues building it on anything newer than Ubuntu 15.10. There is an unofficial AppImage file for Nightingale that may or may not work for you. Here is the recipe that was used to create that AppImage. Or you can build a Docker image for Nightingale.

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