hi! if you’re using a Linux system and you plan to use veadotube but you’re not sure how to make it work, this is the page for you.

installing dependencies

veadotube requires SDL2 installed on your system to run, and freetype + harfbuzz to render text. with non-mini versions, it proritizes finding a development version of SDL3 installed in your system, in order to support Wayland and other new features. the app also optionally uses onnxruntime for neural network support (e.g. Silero VAD) and darling for the Oculus plugin.

installing these depends on your package manager – we develop it on an Arch-based distro, and installing these through any AUR helper should be ok! in any case, most distros already come with SDL2 + freetype + harfbuzz preinstalled, and finding onnxruntime isn’t too hard, usually. darling should be the weirdest one, we’re already looking into another solution for the Oculus plugin in the meanwhile.

note: veadotube mini 2.0a doesn’t use ldconfig to find shared libraries, and instead looks for libSDL2.so, libfreetype.so, libharfbuzz.so, libonnxruntime.so and libdarling.so directly under /lib, /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib. this is fixed for non-mini veadotube, and will be fixed in a future veadotube mini release – for now, you should look into creating symlinks for the installed libraries.

downloading the thing

for mini, visit the official download page over itch.io, and over the Download section, click on Download Now. it’ll prompt a donation window; feel free to tip! if you don’t want to, you can just press the No thanks, just take me to the downloads link.

this should take you to the download screen! select to download the Linux version.

opening the thing

veadotube comes inside a .zip file; don’t run the app directly from inside the .zip! extract it first.

you should be able to run veadotube_mini or veadotube now! your system might also not open it right away, treating it like as something other than an executable, and for that you might need to change its permissions. in most systems, the following steps should work:

1. open a Terminal window on the folder containing the executable;
2. run one of the following commands, depending on the version you downloaded:
   • veadotube mini: chmod +x ./veadotube_mini
   • veadotube mini 1.4 or older: chmod +x ./veadotube\ mini.x86_64
   • veadotube: chmod +x ./veadotube

now you should actually be able to run it :]

chromebooks and whatnot

if you’re using a ChromeOS device, you might be able to install veadotube on it by using the Linux environment in your machine. this YouTube video describes how to install veadotube mini 1.3c, which should give you the general direction for more recent versions, too! beware that this is unofficial, as we don’t own a Chromebook, and have no intention to officially support it.