Recently I discovered the SDK for Samsung Gear S3 that runs Samsung’s Tizen OS and wanted to take a look, partly because it supports writing applications in JavaScript and HTML. Setting it up wasn’t difficult but there were a couple of things that were a bit annoying so here’s a summary of what needs to be done to get up an running as soon as possible.

Before getting started with the installation process we need to install a few dependecies.

sudo apt-get install expect gtk2-engines-pixbuf libgnome2-0 qemu-user-static libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 gettext module-init-tools libudev-dev rpm2cpio

rpm2cpio isn’t explicitly mentioned anywhere but it was neccessary when installing the SDK for Tizen 2.3 that runs on current Gear S3.

Next, it also requires an older version of the libpng library. The current version is 16 but it explicitly was looking for version 12. Some posts suggested just linking the 16 to the filename used by the 12 but I prefered to install the 12 since it could only be called by explicit version name and the default would still stay 16. To do that, we cannot use apt-get since 12 is deprecated and no longer in sources so I had to download the 12 package from:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/amd64/libpng12-0/download

You get a .deb file that you can install as normal.

Finally, Tizen Studio explicitly requires Oracle Java and it will not work with OpenJDK. Moreover, I’ve found, after almost half an hour of tinkering that it specifically needs Java 8. It would not start with Java 9.

To get Java 8:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

and after that check that Java 8 is the default by running:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and selecting the Oracle version.

Finally, you can download the Tizen Studio from https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-studio/download. Side note: choice of mirror made a huge difference in my download speed.

Once download make the .bin executable:

chmod +x web-ide_Tizen_Studio_1.2_....

and then run it with:

./web-ide_Tizen_Studio_1.2_....

.... is there because the file name will be different based on which region you download from for some reason.

After the installation is done, make sure to install the SDK and VM for 2.3 wearable to be able to make apps for the current generation.