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Building & running Nexus on Linux

The counterpart to WINDOWS.md. The apt line in CONTRIBUTING.md is enough to run cargo test --workspace — it installs the modem toolchain and nothing else. Building the actual desktop app needs the GTK/WebKit stack too, and finding that out one missing package at a time is the reason this page exists (reported in issue #18).

What you need

Nexus's modem (libtempo) is Fortran + C/C++ + FFTW, built through CMake by tempo-fast-sys's build script. The shell is Tauri v2, so the app itself needs WebKitGTK and GTK 3. CAT and PTT go through Hamlib's rigctld.

On Debian/Ubuntu — this is the complete list, and it is the same one scripts/build-linux.sh checks for:

sudo apt install \
  build-essential cmake ninja-build gfortran pkg-config \
  libfftw3-dev libboost-dev libssl-dev \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
  librsvg2-dev libxdo-dev libsoup-3.0-dev \
  patchelf libfuse2 \
  nodejs npm \
  libhamlib-utils

Plus rustup with the pinned toolchain — CI uses 1.93.1, and matching it locally is what makes cargo clippy agree with CI.

A few of those are worth a word:

  • libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev is the one people miss. It is not needed for cargo test, so a headless developer never hits it, and its absence shows up as a pkg-config failure deep in the Tauri build rather than as anything that names WebKit.
  • libfuse2 is only for running the built AppImage. The bundler itself works without it (APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1, which is what CI sets).
  • libhamlib-utils gives you rigctl and rigctld. Installing it changes which tests actually run — see below.

Build

cargo build                       # workspace (modem, engine, net)
cargo test --workspace            # headless: no sound card, no radio

npm --prefix ui ci
npm --prefix ui run build         # tsc -b && vite build

./scripts/build-linux.sh          # the .deb + AppImage, as shipped

build-linux.sh reports anything missing before it starts, rather than failing partway.

Tests that depend on what you have installed

This surprises people, and it has cost real time twice:

  • With libhamlib-utils installed, the tests that drive a real rigctl/rigctld actually run. Without it they SKIP, and skipping prints as success. A contributor investigating issue #18 reported a test as "does not reproduce" when it had in fact never executed — seven silent skips in a clean container. If you are chasing a rigctld-related failure somebody else sees, check first that you have Hamlib at all.
  • The reverse also bit us: a test that spawns a real daemon hung every CI run for six hours while passing instantly on any machine without Hamlib installed.

So: which rigctld before drawing a conclusion from a green run in this area.

The two things that are NOT in the repo

Both are gitignored, and both fail quietly rather than loudly if you build without them — worth knowing when you build from a fresh clone or a git worktree, which checks out tracked files only:

  • src-tauri/resources/deepcw/model.onnx — the AI CW decoder weights (AGPL-3.0, © e04). Absent, the build succeeds and simply has no AI CW decoder. build.rs offers NEXUS_ALLOW_MISSING_AICW=1 to say you meant it.
  • src-tauri/resources/hamlib/*.exe / *.dll — the bundled Windows Hamlib, used by the Windows installer and by scripts/gen-hamlib-serial-speeds.mjs.

Which Linux

The published .deb and AppImage are built on Ubuntu 24.04 and need glibc 2.39 or newer — Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, Fedora 40+, Mint 22+. Check with ldd --version. Building from source has no such floor: you get whatever your own toolchain produces.

The AppImage is no exception to the floor. An AppImage carries the application's libraries, not the system C library, so it needs the same minimum the .deb does.

Cross-building the Windows installer from Linux

./scripts/build-windows-cross.sh produces Nexus.exe and the NSIS installer using the MinGW-w64 cross toolchain, with no MSYS2 and no Windows machine. It lists its own prerequisites (gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64, g++-mingw-w64-x86-64, gfortran-mingw-w64-x86-64, and the rest) and reports what is missing before it starts.