n-link/desktop

N-Link

Free, cross-platform, CX-II compatible computer linking program for the TI-Nspire.

This package is a Tauri 2 + Vue 3 + Vite application. It was ported from Tauri 1.0.0-beta.8 / Vue CLI, which linked webkit2gtk-4.0 and could not build or run on current distributions (Ubuntu 26.04 ships only webkit2gtk-4.1).

Currently Linux-only: bundle targets are deb and appimage.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22+ (npm ships with it — this project uses npm workspaces, not yarn)
• Rust 1.97+
• System libraries (Ubuntu/Debian):

sudo apt-get install -y \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev \
  libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-dev \
  libsoup-3.0-dev \
  librsvg2-dev \
  libxdo-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
  libusb-1.0-0-dev \
  build-essential curl wget file

Verify they resolve before building:

for p in webkit2gtk-4.1 javascriptcoregtk-4.1 libsoup-3.0 gtk+-3.0 libusb-1.0; do
  printf "%-24s " "$p"; pkg-config --modversion "$p" || echo MISSING
done

Setup

Run from the repository root (this is a workspace member):

npm install

--legacy-peer-deps is no longer needed — n-link-core is on Vue 3 as of the frontend port.

Note that the root package.json workspaces list contains only desktop and n-link-core. web/ is deliberately excluded: it is still on Nuxt 2 and pulls tailwindcss@1.9.6, which npm hoists to the root and which then shadows the tailwindcss@3 that desktop and @tailwindcss/forms require. Restore the entry when web is migrated.

Development

cd desktop
npm run tauri dev

Production build

cd desktop
npm run tauri build

Produces src-tauri/target/release/bundle/deb/*.deb and .../appimage/*.AppImage.

Headless CLI

The same binary works without a GUI:

./src-tauri/target/release/n-link --help
./src-tauri/target/release/n-link ls /

Notes and gotchas

• cargo commands need dist/ to exist. Tauri's generate_context! macro validates the frontendDist path at compile time, so a bare cargo check / cargo build in src-tauri/ fails on a fresh clone until the frontend has been built once: npm run build --workspace desktop. npm run tauri build does this for you.
• Do not run the binary from a snap-confined shell (for example, the integrated terminal of VS Code installed as a snap). Snap injects an LD_LIBRARY_PATH whose libpthread shadows the system one, producing undefined symbol: __libc_pthread_init. Use a normal terminal.
• AppImage needs FUSE. Without it, run the AppImage with --appimage-extract and launch squashfs-root/AppRun instead.
• vendor/libnspire-sys at the repo root is a locally patched crate wired in via [patch.crates-io]. It raises the CX II NNSE handshake retry limit (10 → 30), fixes the readPacket checksum length bug that made CX II transfers fail with a reported Busy, and adds NNSE retransmission. The build will not reproduce upstream behaviour without it. See nlink-cli/README.md for the details.