kmax
05-18-2007, 03:21 PM
I just wanted to post that I have gotten Alice working under Ubuntu 7.04 (32 bit) without any significant problems. There were a couple of things to watch out for, so I thought I would post those for users to be aware of:
-- By default Ubuntu 7.04 is using the Blackdown JVM. In a default 7.04 installation I found that this actually mostly runs Alice without problems. I say mostly because I did find that the tutorials will not work as the blue overlay becomes opaque and you cannot see anything under it, which basically makes the tutorials unusable. All other functions I tested worked however, even when running under Beryl.
-- I installed the Sun Java (tried both 1.5 and 1.6) from the Ubuntu repositories. In order to get Ubuntu to use one of these you have to run the following command:
update-java-alternatives -s [java-1.5.0-sun|java-6-sun]
**note, pick the appropriate of the two java's that you installed and only use that as the option.
Once you run that you can start Alice in the same manner and it will use the new jvm and these work completely as far as I can tell, including the tutorials.
-- One side note to using the Sun Java, I did find that it will not run properly if you are currently using Beryl/Compiz. This could possibly by environment/system/video card related only so your mileage may vary, but on my system running Alice with Sun Java and Beryl on resulted in only the preview world window showing and nothing else. Switching to metacity and restarting Alice allows it to run without problems.
Hope this helps someone else out there and thanks to all of those that put Alice together, it really is a great teaching tool and my daughter is extremely excited to start learning!
-- By default Ubuntu 7.04 is using the Blackdown JVM. In a default 7.04 installation I found that this actually mostly runs Alice without problems. I say mostly because I did find that the tutorials will not work as the blue overlay becomes opaque and you cannot see anything under it, which basically makes the tutorials unusable. All other functions I tested worked however, even when running under Beryl.
-- I installed the Sun Java (tried both 1.5 and 1.6) from the Ubuntu repositories. In order to get Ubuntu to use one of these you have to run the following command:
update-java-alternatives -s [java-1.5.0-sun|java-6-sun]
**note, pick the appropriate of the two java's that you installed and only use that as the option.
Once you run that you can start Alice in the same manner and it will use the new jvm and these work completely as far as I can tell, including the tutorials.
-- One side note to using the Sun Java, I did find that it will not run properly if you are currently using Beryl/Compiz. This could possibly by environment/system/video card related only so your mileage may vary, but on my system running Alice with Sun Java and Beryl on resulted in only the preview world window showing and nothing else. Switching to metacity and restarting Alice allows it to run without problems.
Hope this helps someone else out there and thanks to all of those that put Alice together, it really is a great teaching tool and my daughter is extremely excited to start learning!