Linux installation

Overview

Serial Studio ships three package formats for Linux, each available for x86_64 (x64) and ARM64 (arm64). All of them come from the releases page and contain the same application; pick the format that fits your distribution.

A Flathub package is also available; it follows Flatpak's own signing and update mechanism and is not covered here.

Every package bundles its own C runtime (glibc) next to the application, so one package set runs on any distribution from the Debian 10 / RHEL 8 generation onward; see the Supported distributions section below.

Signing key

Release packages are signed with the Serial Studio release key:

The RPM carries the signature in its package header, the DEB carries a debsigs origin signature, and the AppImage embeds a signature in its ELF payload. What your system checks automatically differs per format; the sections below spell it out.

RPM (Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE)

rpm, dnf, and zypper verify the header signature of standalone .rpm files. Without the release key in the RPM database, installation warns about an unknown or missing key (for example Signature verification failed or a prompt to trust an unknown key). Import the key once:

sudo rpm --import https://serial-studio.com/gpg-key.asc

Verify the download:

rpm -K Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.rpm

Expected output:

Serial-Studio-Pro-4.0.3-Linux-x64.rpm: digests signatures OK

Install with your package manager so dependencies resolve automatically:

sudo dnf install ./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.rpm     # Fedora, RHEL
sudo zypper install ./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.rpm  # openSUSE

The package installs the serial-studio-pro binary to /usr/bin and adds a Serial Studio Pro entry to the application menu. Uninstall with sudo dnf remove serial-studio-pro (or the zypper equivalent).

DEB (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint)

sudo apt install ./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.deb

The leading ./ matters: it tells apt to install a local file instead of searching the configured repositories. Uninstall with sudo apt remove serial-studio-pro.

The package embeds a debsigs origin signature (the _gpgorigin member inside the .deb). Note that apt and dpkg do not verify signatures of individual package files; on Debian-based systems, trust normally flows through signed repository metadata, which does not apply to a direct download. The embedded signature exists for auditing tools such as debsig-verify; the download itself is protected by HTTPS.

AppImage

The AppImage runs on any distribution without installation:

chmod +x Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.AppImage
./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.AppImage

If launching fails with a FUSE error, the AppImage still works via self-extraction:

./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.AppImage --appimage-extract
./squashfs-root/AppRun

The AppImage embeds a GPG signature from the release key. Display it with:

./Serial-Studio-Pro-*-Linux-x64.AppImage --appimage-signature

Supported distributions

All three formats ship the build host's glibc as a matched set and launch the application through that bundled runtime, so the host's glibc version does not matter. The tested baseline is RHEL 8 / Rocky Linux 8 and Debian 10 (glibc 2.28), on both x86_64 and ARM64; every release is smoke-tested against it. External programs started by Serial Studio (for example through the Process driver) still run against the host's own libraries.

Releases up to 4.0.3 shipped the official Qt libraries against the host glibc and refused to start on older systems with an error such as version 'GLIBC_2.34' not found; updating to the current release resolves it.

Serial port permissions

On most distributions, regular users cannot open serial devices until they join the dialout group (uucp on Arch-based systems):

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Log out and back in for the group change to take effect. More first-connection fixes are in Getting Started and Troubleshooting.

See also

• Getting Started: first connection walkthrough for all platforms.
• Windows Installation: MSI, portable ZIP, and Microsoft Store packages on Windows.
• Troubleshooting: fixes for common connection and parsing problems.
• Command Line Interface: flags for running Serial Studio from scripts and headless environments.