How to Fix JASP Not Running Problem on Ubuntu 20.04

JASP is a new open-source statistic program that is getting attentions from researchers looking to do both classical and Bayesian analysis. If you install it on Ubuntu 20.04 but it’s not running correctly, this article is going to show you how to fix it.

The installation is pretty easy on Linux. If your computer already has flatpak installed, you can use the following two commands to install JASP

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.jaspstats.JASP

My user reported that even JASP is installed, she cannot run it. Whenever she click on the JASP icon, the cursor changed to a spinning ball and nothing happens. Upon checking the /var/log/syslog.1, I found this entry:

org.jaspstats.JASP.desktop[26757]: [3:9:1018/140401.782220:FATAL:flatpak_sandbox.cc(286)] Your Flatpak version is too old, please update it

I checked the flatpak version on the computer, it is already the highest version. To fix this problem, we need to use the official Flatpak PPA. Use these commands to update the flatpak version:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak

After flatpak upgrade, the user was able to launch JASP.