No mountable file system on macOS

[sabinomaggi]

Any idea why on macOS I get a "no mountable file system" while trying to mount the .dmg?
I have tried the latest releases (20.2.4 and 20.2.2) and also the last beta with the same results.

[pbek]

I'm sorry, I've no troubles mounting it. Are you sure your download didn't went wrong? What is the filesize of the dmg and what does shasum QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg say for you in the terminal?

228504a9c496abb7d21bb59f1a51a0240e358c55  QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg

[sabinomaggi]

Shasum is ok:

$ shasum QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg
228504a9c496abb7d21bb59f1a51a0240e358c55 QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg

Also, my md5 is

$ md5 QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg
MD5 (QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg) = d11748a29f8934c9dd0bf5e7251ee9bd

I have tried many times to download the file, and I always get the same result. I have also tried to download previous versions, down to about 19.x and I always get the same result. By the way, on my Mac I have 16.12.9 and that works well.
For what versions of macOS did you compile the latest versions of QOwnNotes?

[pbek]

Qt 5.13 works with all recent versions of macos. Lots of people are using qownnotes on macos. But this doesn't matter. You can't even mount the dmg.

[sabinomaggi]

I think I have understood the issue.

$ hdiutil verify QOwnNotes-20.2.4.dmg

reports among other info that the disk image is made using APFS and not HFS+

...
disk image (Apple_APFS : 4): verified CRC32 $EDF37C20
...

so it won't work on all versions of macOS that do not support APFS, i.e. from High Sierra amd above. The Mac I have used for these tests runs El Capitan (much stabler and reliable than later macOS versions) and that is the reason it does not open the dmg file.

Could you please add a page on the website or on github, listing for each of the last versions of macOS the stable compatible versions of QOwnNotes?
For instance, QOwnNotes is compatible with El Capitan up to version xx, Sierra/High Sierra up to version yy and the like?

[pbek]

I run QOwnNotes on 10.15.3 right now and every previous version before.

The dmg is created by this line:

QOwnNotes/travis/create-dmg.sh

Line 119 in f8561c3

hdiutil create -srcfolder ./$TEMPDIR -format UDBZ ./$APP.dmg

[pbek]

According to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Image_Format UDBZ isn't obsolete.

[sabinomaggi]

You are right, UDBZ is ok. For better compatibility, you could try to add a -fs switch with the option JHFS+ (or simply HFS+), more or less like this

hdiutil create -srcfolder ./$TEMPDIR -ov -format UDBZ  -fs JHFS+ ./$APP.dmg 

(-ov ensures that the new image overwrites an already existing one, otherwise hdiutil create fails).

[pbek]

Ok, we'll try that then.

20.2.5

• attempted to fix rare QOwnNotes disk image mount problems under macOS

[pbek]

There now is a new release, could you please test it and report if it works for you?

[sabinomaggi]

Yes, now I can open the dmg file without any problem. Many thanks for the quick fix!

Unfortunately the latest versions of QOwnNotes run only on more recent versions of macOS than El Capitan, but that is another question. Do you have an idea which versions of macOS does QOwnNotes 20.2.5 need to run? It would also be nice to know which was the latest version of QOwnNotes working on El Capitan (which is still very popular).

[pbek]

I think the currently used Qt 5.13.2 is supported on macOS 10.13 upwards, see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/macos.html

Of course you can build QOwnNotes yourself, it works with Qt 5.3 upwards.
See https://www.qownnotes.org/installation#building

[pbek]

It seems https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.11/supported-platforms.html is the last supported release for macOS 10.11.