Failing to install Sublime Text 3 in Ubuntu 16.04 using apt-get command

Question

I had downloaded sublime previously directly from the browser as tarball and saved it in a folder (and of course extracted it).But this way I wasn't able to make Sublime my default editor and it didn't feature as an application when I tried to open a text file with a right-click.I read somewhere installing sublime text 3 using commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

will solve my problem. So I directly deleted the Sublime_text3 folder saved in my Downloads directory and then used the given commands. But when I entered the 3rd command line I got the following error(just writing the error part):

subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:/var/cache/apt/archives/sublime-text-installer_3126-2~webupd8~1_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Can anyone explain why this error is coming and suggest a way to solve this problem? Also if anyone can tell how I can set Sublime as my default text editor from the tarball downloaded from the sublime text 3 website. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

you can try this command to install Sublime Text using Snap Store..

sudo snap install sublime-text --classic

Answer 2

I'm not sure overall how to fix that error or what's going on (I use Slackware and not Ubuntu/Debian), but for a long while there have been official Sublime repositories several different Linux distributions, including Ubuntu/Debian.

It's highly recommended that you use those if you want to go the package route and not use existing solutions such as the one referenced in your question or in the other response here, if for no other reason than only the official repository is guaranteed to contain an unmodified version of Sublime. Additionally the official repositories are always updated on release, which may or may not happen in a timely manner in other repositories.

The links referenced above contain instructions on how to set up and use Sublime from those repositories, and if you have any issues a good place to ask is the forum.

One thing to note which isn't mentioned explicitly in the above pages is that to use the official repositories, you should:

• Choose only one of them (stable or dev, noting that you need a license to run a dev version) and not add both repositories or things will not work as expected
• Ensure that other repositories that you've added (such as the one in your question) are removed to make sure that the package system definitely pulls the correct package

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There are a couple of ways to go if you want to install Sublime from the tarball version. The easiest way would be to extract it, then manually set up launcher shortcuts and so on based on what falls out. How exactly you would register it as a text editor in that case, I'm not entirely sure since I don't use the same distribution as you.

Presuming that the process would be easier if Sublime was installed in a way similar to how the package manager would do it, the tarball comes with a desktop file and icons, so the following steps can be used to (presumably) do what the package installer would do.

The proviso here is that although these steps work on my non-Ubuntu machine, I don't know if all of the referenced tools are installed by default on an Ubuntu system, so so more setup work may be involved.

Note also that the files in the tarball are not entirely self-consistent, which makes this a little bit more work.

First, you need to extract the tarball (replace tarball filename as appropriate for location and build):

cd /opt
sudo tar xvf ~/Downloads/sublime_text_3_build_3176_x64.tar.bz2

This creates the folder /opt/sublime_text_3/ and fills it with the contents of the tarball.

Next, you want to install the icons contained in the tarball. As far as I have been able to tell, the icons in the tarball aren't in the correct directory structure, requiring each to be copied into place individually. We also need to update the icon cache to ensure that the new icon is noticed by the system:

cd /usr/share/icons/hicolor/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/16x16/sublime-text.png 16x16/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/32x32/sublime-text.png 32x32/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/48x48/sublime-text.png 48x48/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/128x128/sublime-text.png 128x128/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/256x256/sublime-text.png 256x256/apps/
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t .

Now we want to install the sublime_text.desktop file that is in the tarball. Note however that like the icons, it seems kind of broken; the tarball extracts to sublime_text_3 but the desktop file assumes that the application is actually in /opt/sublime_text instead.

As such, you either need to rename the folder that was extracted to sublime_text to match what is in the desktop file, or edit the desktop file to make the path correct.

The following steps assume that we want to keep the folder the same and rewrite the desktop file. These commands will generate a new file named sublime_text_3.desktop with the changes.

cd /opt/sublime_text_3/
sed -e "s^/sublime_text/^/sublime_text_3/^" sublime_text.desktop | sudo tee sublime_text_3.desktop

Now you can install the desktop file. You do that with desktop-file-install, passing it the name of the desktop file. For accessing Sublime from the command line, you also want to set up a subl link to the installed copy of Sublime.

Adjust the paths as appropriate here if you decided to rename the folder instead of editing the desktop file:

sudo desktop-file-install sublime_text_3.desktop --rebuild-mime-info-cache
sudo ln -s /opt/sublime_text_3/sublime_text /usr/bin/subl

At this point Sublime should show up as an installed application, or at least it does in my Window Manager; if not, executing sudo update-desktop-database may help refresh it.

Answer 3

You can try this once. i hope it will help

wget https://download.sublimetext.com/files/sublime-text_build-4126_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i sublime-text_build-4126_amd64.deb