FieldWorks is supported by SIL only for Ubuntu. This is unfortunate if you are using a different distribution, but perhaps it is possible to run FieldWorks inside a Docker container. This is an attempt to do precisely that.
Assuming that you already have Docker installed, build the image by running the following command in this directory:
sed -i "s/uid=1000 gid=100/uid=$(id -u) gid=$(id -g)/" Dockerfile
docker build -t fieldworks .
Because FieldWorks is comprised of multiple commands, we can't just run one of
the applications in the container, instead, the container runs a proxy for the
commands, which can be sent via netcat. We start the container by running:
docker run -ti --rm -p 3030:3030 -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -v $HOME:/home/you fieldworks
Then we can run commands in the container by passing them to the proxy:
echo "echo hello world" | nc localhost 3030
Theoretically, you could just run nc localhost 3030, except that the proxy
drops the connection if it has not read anything for more than 1 second.
In particular however, you might want to use the following commands:
echo "fieldworks-flex" | nc localhost 3030
echo "fieldworks-te" | nc localhost 3030