Linux installation details

Article
05/10/2022
8 minutes to read

Linux is a highly variable environment and with the sheer number of desktop environments and distributions can be complicated to get working. If you stick to supported versions of Ubuntu Desktop (16.04+), CentOS 7, or Fedora Workstation (27+) and only use official distributions of VS Code, you should find the process straight forward. However, in the event that you are using a non-standard configuration or downstream distribution, you may or may not run into some hiccups. This document provides some information on requirements and some troubleshooting details that might help you get up and running even if your configuration is only community supported. Note that Live Share only supports 64-bit Linux.

Install Linux prerequisites

Some distributions of Linux are missing libraries Live Share needs to function. By default, Live Share attempts to detect and install Linux prerequisites for you. You'll see a toast notification when Live Share encounters a problem that can originate from missing libraries asking you for permission to install them.

Toast notification showing message that Linux pre-requisites are missing

When you click "Install", a terminal window will appear where your OS will ask you to enter your admin / root (sudo) password to continue. Assuming the script completes successfully, reload Visual Studio Code when prompted you should be all set! You may also want to check out tips by distribution for other hints and workarounds if any exist.

If you see a message indicating the script does not support your distribution, see tips for community supported distributions for information the community has shared with us.

If you prefer not to have VS Code run the command for you, you can also opt to re-run the very latest version of this script at any time manually by using the following command in a Terminal window:

wget -O ~/vsls-reqs https://aka.ms/vsls-linux-prereq-script && chmod +x ~/vsls-reqs && ~/vsls-reqs

Tips by distribution

While the prerequisite install script above covers a variety of distributions, you may be wondering what is typically missing from vanilla installations. The following list shows the key libraries that were missing in a fresh install of a given distribution. The list also provides some tips that can help you get up and running if you hit a problem.

Distribution	Vanilla install missing libraries	Additional steps
Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 (64-bit)	`libssl1.1`	<none>
Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
Kubuntu 18.04 (64-bit)	`gnome-keyring desktop-file-utils`	<none>
Kubuntu 16.04 (64-bit)	`gnome-keyring desktop-file-utils`	<none>
Xubuntu 18.04 (64-bit)	<none>	Ensure "Launch GNOME services on startup" is checked in the "Advanced" tab of "Session and Startup". If you run into sign-in trouble, install `seahorse`, start "Passwords and Keys", verify you have "Login" keyring and that you can unlock it.
Xubuntu 16.04 (64-bit)	<none>	Ensure "Launch GNOME services on startup" is checked in the "Advanced" tab of "Session and Startup". If you run into sign-in trouble, install `seahorse`, start "Passwords and Keys", verify you have "Login" keyring and that you can unlock it.
Mint 19 Cinnamon (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
Mint 18.3 Cinnamon (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
Debian 10 (Buster) Testing (64-bit)	Release not stable, so unknown.	Debian Testing and Unstable (Sid) are not officially supported. There is a known issue in .NET Core that affects Live Share. See here for a workaround. There is a known issue with WSL certificates.
Debian 9 GNOME Desktop (64-bit)	<none>	You may need to install `sudo` and add your user to the sudo group to use the automated install script.
Fedora Workstation 29 (64-bit)	`openssl-libs`	<none>
Fedora Workstation 28 (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
Fedora Workstation 27 (64-bit)	<none>	<none>
CentOS 7 GNOME Desktop (64-bit)	<none>	<none>

See tips for community supported distributions for information about other non-Debian / Ubuntu or RHL based distributions.

Additional details can also be found below on the specific libraries Live Share needs.

Tips for community supported distros

Distributions outside of the Debian / Ubuntu or RHL trees are not officially supported by Visual Studio Code or .NET Core. Therefore, by extension, they are not officially supported by Visual Studio Live Share either. However, the community has contributed some useful information about getting Live Share up and running on a number of additional distributions.

PRs welcome: If you're interested in updating this information with your favorite distribution, submit a PR for this file in our docs GitHub repo. Even better, if you'd like to get the dependency installer supporting your favorite distribution, you can submit a PR for this file.

Distribution	Working?	Vanilla install missing libraries	Additional Steps
Arch Linux (64-bit)	Yes	Varies. Possible libraries: `gcr liburcu openssl-1.0 krb5 zlib icu gnome-keyring libsecret desktop-file-utils xorg-xprop icu69`	Supported by the prerequisite install script. Use the visual-studio-code-bin AUR package for VS Code. `sudo` will need to be installed to use the automated prerequisite install script. `gnome-keyring` may require additional setup steps in some desktop environments.
Manjaro 17.1 (64-bit)	Yes	`xorg-xprop liburcu icu69`	Supported by the prerequisite install script. Use the visual-studio-code-bin AUR package for VS Code.
openSuSE LEAP 15 KDE (64-bit)	Yes	`libopenssl1_0_0 gnome-keyring`	Supported by the prerequisite install script.
Solus 3 (64-bit)	Yes	`xprop`	Supported by the prerequisite install script. Versions of the `vscode` package prior to release 57 were missing required product.json values (see below). Upgrade the `vscode` package to resolve this issue.
Gentoo (64-bit)	Yes	Highly variable. Possible missing packages: `dev-libs/openssl-1.0.2 net-libs/libgsasl dev-libs/icu sys-libs/zlib sys-apps/util-linux app-crypt/libsecret gnome-base/gnome-keyring x11-apps/xprop`	The `visual-studio-code` package in the jorgicio overlay is known to work.

Install prerequisites manually

While we recommend using Live Share's dependency install script, this section provides further details on library requirements in the event you want perform these steps yourself or are using a distribution not supported by the script.

Typical missing libraries in vanilla installations can be found in the tips by distribution and tips for community supported distributions sections.

Detailed library requirements

Visual Studio Live Share's native library requirements come from its use of .NET Core 2.1, libsecret to persist credentials, and its browser integration. The following table summarizes these requirements for distributions officially supported by .NET Core.

Distribution	.NET Core Reqs	Credential Storage Reqs	Browser Integration Reqs
Ubuntu and downstream distributions	`libssl1.0.0 libkrb5-3 zlib1g libicu55` (for Ubuntu 16.04, Mint 18.3) or `libicu57` (for Ubuntu 17.10) or `libicu60` (for Ubuntu 18.04, Mint 19)	`libsecret-1-0 gnome-keyring` (or libsecret supported keyring - Kwallet does not support libsecret)	`desktop-file-utils x11-utils`
Debian 9 and downstream distributions	`libssl1.0.2 libkrb5-3 zlib1g libicu57`	`libsecret-1-0 gnome-keyring` (or libsecret supported keyring - Kwallet does not support libsecret)	`desktop-file-utils x11-utils`
RHL / CentOS/ Fedora	`openssl-libs krb5-libs zlib libicu` Fedora also requires `openssl-libs`	`libsecret gnome-keyring` (or libsecret supported keyring - Kwallet does not support libsecret)	`desktop-file-utils xprop`
Alpine Linux	`openssl1.1 icu krb5 zlib`	`libsecret gnome-keyring` (or libsecret supported keyring - Kwallet does not support libsecret)	`desktop-file-utils xprop`

While other distributions require the same libraries, their package names may vary. You can find some of these in the tips for community supported distributions section.

Debian / Ubuntu

Libraries may be installed on Debian/Ubuntu based distributions by running sudo apt install <library-name> in a terminal.

For Ubuntu based distributions including Mint, run:

sudo apt install libssl1.1 libkrb5-3 zlib1g libicu[0-9][0-9] gnome-keyring libsecret-1-0 desktop-file-utils x11-utils

For Debian 9 and non-Ubuntu downstream distributions, run:

sudo apt install libssl1.0.2 libkrb5-3 zlib1g libicu57 gnome-keyring libsecret-1-0 desktop-file-utils x11-utils

Fedora / CentOS / RHL

Libraries may be installed on Fedora/CentOS/RHL based distributions by running sudo yum install <library-name> in a terminal. For example, this will install everything:

    sudo yum install openssl-libs krb5-libs zlib libicu libsecret gnome-keyring desktop-file-utils xprop

VS Code OSS Issues

Arch Linux/Manjaro Users: Use the visual-studio-bin AUR package to avoid this problem.

Packages of Visual Studio Code that are either vanilla or modified versions of VS Code OSS can be missing a critical value in product.json file that prevents Visual Studio Live Share from activating.

A quick way to see you might be hitting this problem is to go to Help > "Toggle Developer Tools" and see if you find a stack trace indicating the Live Share extension did not activate because it was using a "proposed API."

To verify this is your issue, check the contents of product.json. The file's location does vary by package, but it is usually in one of the following locations:

/usr/share/code/resources/app/product.json
/usr/share/vscode/resources/app/product.json

If the extensionAllowedProposedApi property is missing or you do not see "ms-vsliveshare.vsliveshare" referenced, you are using an OSS version with this problem.

As a workaround, you can add the following into the product.json:

"extensionAllowedProposedApi": [
  "ms-vsliveshare.vsliveshare",
  "ms-vscode.node-debug",
  "ms-vscode.node-debug2"
]

See above for additional details on whether the distribution you are using is known to work.

Linux browser integration

Visual Studio Live Share typically does not require additional installation steps to enable browser integration on Linux.

To accomplish this, Live Share automatically places a desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications and the required launcher itself in ~/.local/share/vsliveshare when the extension first initializes. No action is required on your part if this succeeds.

In some cases, distributions either do not support this location or require tweaks to get it to work with their vanilla installs. In these cases, Live Share falls back to using /usr/local/share instead. As a result, you may be notified that your admin (sudo) password is required to complete the installation process. A terminal window will appear telling you where the browser launcher will be installed. Simply enter your password when prompted and press enter once the installation completes to close the terminal window.

If you'd prefer to run the command yourself instead, you can click "Copy instead" which will copy the terminal command to the clipboard instead.

Finally, if you opt to skip this step entirely, you can still join collaboration sessions manually, but you will not be able to join by opening an invite link in the browser. Note that you can always access the command again later, by hitting Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P and selecting the "Live Share: Launcher Setup" command.