Generated on 2026-03-18

GemStone can now be installed through the apt package manager. This site documents the process to enable the GemStone Personal Package Archive (PPA).

General Notes

The GemStone PPA packages are tested against the listed Linux distributions and their noted versions.

• Debian 12
• Debian 13
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04

The GemStone product directory is read-only when installed via apt. Your configuration and extents must be stored outside of the GemStone product directory.

The directories /opt/gemstone, /opt/gemstone/locks, and /opt/gemstone/log will be automatically created. As no user or group is created by the installer, the directory permissions are permissive. Restricting access to a custom unix user, which is used to run GemStone, is recommended.

Adding the GemStone PPA

# Install dependencies for the remaining commands
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ca-certificates curl

# Add GemTalk's GPG key
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://ppa.gemtalksystems.com/static/gemstone.asc -o /etc/apt/keyrings/gemstone.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/gemstone.asc

# Add the PPA
sudo curl -fsSL https://ppa.gemtalksystems.com/static/gemstone.list -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gemstone.list
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gemstone.list

# Refresh available package information
sudo apt update

Installing GemStone

The PPA makes multiple versions of GemStone available. More than one version can be installed concurrently. Depending on the version of GemStone, a package for x86_64 or arm64 may be available. The complete list of packages appropriate for your system is available via apt search gemstone-server.

All packages are named with the following convention gemstone-server-<version>. To install GemStone 3.7.5, you would run the following command.

sudo apt install gemstone-server-3.7.5

For x86_64 builds, the product directory is installed as a child directory of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gemstone. For arm64 builds, the product directory is installed as a child directory of /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/gemstone.

Once installed, GemStone 3.7.5 will be available in one of the following locations.

• /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gemstone/3.7.5
• /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/gemstone/3.7.5