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12. Install StudioFS on Linux

Work in progress

On Linux, StudioFS mounts storage through FUSE3. This component lets the program present files from S3 as an ordinary folder: your editing application sees a path to the media, while StudioFS takes care of retrieving and saving it.

In this chapter, we will prepare the system, download StudioFS, and check that it starts. Creating a volume and actually mounting the storage come in the next chapters. The folder for our future drive will be empty for now—that is normal; the media has not arrived yet.

Which Linux distribution should I use?

StudioFS has been tested on Ubuntu 24.04 and Rocky Linux 9.4. It should work on other Linux distributions, but we have not tested them; system package names and requirements may differ.

You need administrator privileges to install system packages. Run StudioFS as your regular user.

Installing system dependencies

Ubuntu 24.04

Open a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y fuse3 libfuse3-3

These are system libraries and tools needed to run the program and mount FUSE3.

Rocky Linux 9.4

The required packages come from the standard Rocky Linux repositories; EPEL and CRB are not needed.

sudo dnf install -y fuse3 fuse3-libs

If a package cannot be found, first check repository availability and your system version. Do not replace FUSE3 with the older FUSE2: StudioFS uses version 3.

Desktop indicator in 0.2.1

The Linux tray uses KSNI/StatusNotifierItem over your session D-Bus; GTK3, GLib, libxdo and AppIndicator libraries are no longer StudioFS prerequisites. A compatible desktop host, such as KDE Plasma, displays the icon. On GNOME, enable an AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem extension; tooltips may not be displayed. If the watcher starts later or restarts on the same bus, the backend registers again. Without a compatible host or session bus, mounting continues without the tray. A tray helper blocked in D-Bus is terminated after a two-second shutdown grace period; the mount result is preserved. An absent icon does not confirm that synchronization has finished. Older 0.2.0 binaries retain their GTK/AppIndicator requirements.

Checking FUSE3

The checks are the same on both systems:

fusermount3 --version
ls -l /dev/fuse

The first command checks that the fusermount3 utility is available. The second shows the kernel device used for mounting.

If /dev/fuse is missing on a regular Linux system, an administrator can try loading the module:

sudo modprobe fuse

Then check for the device again. In a container or restricted environment, installing packages alone is not enough: the host must provide access to /dev/fuse and allow FUSE mounts. On a managed server, its administrator needs to make that change.

Downloading StudioFS

Open the StudioFS releases page and download the build for your system and architecture. Extract it if it is packaged in an archive. In the install command, replace /path/to/studiofs with the path to the downloaded executable:

mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"
install -m 755 "/path/to/studiofs" "$HOME/.local/bin/studiofs"
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
studiofs --version
studiofs --help

The export command applies to the current terminal. To keep the path after closing it, add this line to your shell's configuration file if it is not already there. For Bash, this is usually ~/.bashrc. Then open a new terminal and run studiofs --version again.

If you have installed StudioFS before, check which file is being launched:

command -v studiofs

In this example, we expect the path to studiofs in your .local/bin folder. A different path may mean that the terminal finds an older copy before the new one.

Preparing a mount folder

Create /mnt/StudioFS and give it to your user so StudioFS can create mount points inside it:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/StudioFS
sudo chown "$(id -un):$(id -gn)" /mnt/StudioFS
ls -ld /mnt/StudioFS

For a volume named studio, the actual mount point will be /mnt/StudioFS/studio: StudioFS appends the volume name to the directory you provide. Do not put media in it before mounting: ordinary local files will not automatically become volume files, and once the file system is mounted, it will hide the folder's existing contents.

Run StudioFS as the same user who will work with the media. There is no need to make the folder accessible to everyone with chmod 777 or run the program through sudo to get past an unexplained access error. First check the folder's owner and access to /dev/fuse. These examples prepare a mount for your user; access from other accounts requires a separate permissions check.

If something will not start

  • A system library is missing. Make sure you installed the system packages listed above.
  • studiofs: command not found. Run the file by its full path, "$HOME/.local/bin/studiofs" --version, and check your PATH settings.
  • A FUSE access error. Check that /dev/fuse exists, its permissions, and any restrictions imposed by the environment. In a container, this is often a host configuration issue.

Successful --version and --help commands mean that the command-line program starts. They do not yet test a file system mount, PostgreSQL, or S3. We will check those when creating and mounting the first volume.

What is next?

We now have the program, FUSE3, and a place for our future drive. In the next chapter, we will create the first volume with studiofs init and bring the PostgreSQL and S3 services prepared earlier together into one working storage system.

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