Warpinator is a file sharing tool created by the Linux Mint team. It was first released along with Linux Mint 20, but there is no official build for Linux Mint 19.3. Fortunately, the instructions on its GitHub repo allow us to build the app from source. At the time of writing, the newest tag is v1.4.5, but due to the older versions of the packaging tools available on Linux Mint 19.3, I had to use an older tag, which is v1.2.9.

The following are the instructions to build and install the v1.2.9 Warpinator on Linux Mint 19.3.

# Add the PPA so that python3-grpc-tools is available
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:clementlefebvre/grpc
sudo apt-get update

# Install build dependencies listed below, note minimum versions:
sudo apt-get install python3-grpc-tools python3-grpcio

# Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/linuxmint/warpinator.git

# Enter the folder, specify version:
cd warpinator
git checkout 1.2.9

# Try to build. If this fails, it's probably due to missing dependencies.
sudo apt-get install debhelper dh-python gnome-pkg-tools meson gobject-intr
ospection

echo 10 > debian/compat

dpkg-buildpackage --no-sign -d

cd ..

If everything works, you should now see warpinator_1.2.9_all.deb. Before installing it, you will need to get the dependency python3-ifaddr. Download the file from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-ifaddr/python3-ifaddr_0.1.6-1_all.deb. Install both the .deb files manually.

After installation, for some unknown reason, the executable at /usr/bin/warpinator (which is a Python script) could not import the module ‘warpinator’. The module is located at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/warpinator/. I had to manually add the path to the Python script. To do so:

sudoedit /usr/bin/warpinator

# Find the line which says:
#   sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join("/usr", "libexec/warpinator/"))
# Add the following line after that line:
#   sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join("/usr", "lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/warpinator/"))

Hopefully you should be able to run Warpinator (can be found at Applications > Accessories > Warpinator). Using Warpinator, you can easily transfer files from an old Linux Mint system to a new one!