Mageia forum

I would like to install Anki via Flatpak in the Mageia 9 Xfce desktop version of Linux and would appreciate some help with the errors shown below. Even though the Flatpak installation steps all seem to complete without error Anki fails to run.

To begin I followed the instructions at https://flatpak.org/setup/Mageia to install Flatpak and https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.ankiweb.Anki to install Anki

At a command line I used “flatpak run net.ankiweb.Anki” and generated the following errors:

Code: Select all

Starting Anki 25.09.2…
    Qt warning: Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
    2026-04-15 20:01:00,102:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on http://127.0.0.1:40375
    [2:26:0415/200121.947694:ERROR:bus.cc(408)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
    libva error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/intel-vaapi-driver/iHD_drv_video.so init failed
    Starting main loop…
    blocked main thread for 517ms:
    File “/app/bin/anki”, line 8, in
    sys.exit(run())
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/init.py”, line 565, in run
    _run()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/init.py”, line 772, in _run
    app.exec()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/progress.py”, line 121, in handler
    func()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/main.py”, line 231, in on_window_init
    fn()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/main.py”, line 330, in setupProfile
    self.loadProfile()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/main.py”, line 512, in loadProfile
    if not self.loadCollection():
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/main.py”, line 650, in loadCollection
    self._loadCollection()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/aqt/main.py”, line 686, in _loadCollection
    self.col = Collection(cpath, backend=self.backend)
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/anki/collection.py”, line 152, in init
    self.reopen()
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/anki/collection.py”, line 293, in reopen
    self._backend.open_collection(
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/anki/_backend_generated.py”, line 143, in open_collection
    raw_bytes = self._run_command(3, 0, message.SerializeToString())
    File “/app/lib/python3.13/site-packages/anki/_backend.py”, line 167, in _run_command
    print(“”.join(traceback.format_stack()))

Any comments or suggestions on the above errors or any installation checks that could be done would be much appreciated

Please use code tags for terminal output. ~Germ

Welcome to our forum
To begin with, we have an own Flatpak page: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Flatpak
I dont know much about this but as a basic check, can you install and run Firefox Flatpak?

Morgano,
Thank you for your response and welcome greeting.

Your suggestion pointed me in the right direction with the result that Anki is now working as normal.

The link explained how to install Flatpak, search for and install applications.

Best regards

Great then, and thank you for the feedback on the wiki

Please edit the subject header of your first post: so it begins with "[SOLVED]".

Out of curiosity, what did you do differently ? As the instructions how to setup flatpak are the same in our wiki and the flatpak site?

Thank you for your interest and your question. Finding an answer turned out to be quite interesting!

As far as I can see the only thing that I did differently was to start Anki from a command line, when using the instructions at https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.ankiweb.Anki, but from the icon created during installation when using the instructions at https://flatpak.org/setup/Mageia. The former gave the errors shown in my original post but the latter caused Anki to run as normal. This seemed to suggest that Anki would work in Mageia via the Mageia version of Flatpak but this may have been a mistake.

The current situation seems to be that Anki works most of the time but unfortunately sometimes opens to a blank main screen and then close down again. This seems to be a problem related to glibc, see https://docs.ankiweb.net/platform/linux ... indow.html

If I try the packaged version from the Ankiweb site and try to run Anki a message is displayed that says that no Qt platform plugin could be initialised. Using Flatpak was a way of avoiding the problem with the packaged version but there appears to be a related problem with the version via Flatpak.

I am not too sure that i have answered your question!

fabbro wrote:As far as I can see the only thing that I did differently was to start Anki from a command line, when using the instructions at https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.ankiweb.Anki, but from the icon created during installation when using the instructions at https://flatpak.org/setup/Mageia. The former gave the errors shown in my original post but the latter caused Anki to run as normal. This seemed to suggest that Anki would work in Mageia via the Mageia version of Flatpak but this may have been a mistake.

Hi there, in both cases you installed and ran the same flatpak, there is no separate "Mageia version of Flatpak". And it shouldn't matter if you start it via the icon or the command e.g. flatpak run net.ankiweb.Anki which is why I asked.
Are you sure you ran the command to start it as regular user?

Thank you for the clarification.

The confusion between running Anki via a desktop icon or through a terminal window may have been due to the fact that via a terminal window the version used seemed to have been the non-functioning version from Ankiweb.net rather than Flatpak. The Ankiweb.net version has now been uninstalled and Anki runs ok via an icon or in a terminal window via flatpak run net.ankiweb.Anki.

Thanks again for your help.

Please mark the thread as solved by editing the subject of the first post and prefix it with [SOLVED], thanks in advance.