[vox] ubuntu, java, and processing

[Bill Broadley]

On 01/10/2012 08:19 PM, Eric Engelhard wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:32:44AM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, I should have clarified that it is published APPLETS that I can
>>> not view such as my own applets as well as those at
>>> openprocessing.org.
>>
>> Can you name one specifically?  I tried conways game of life, spore 1,
>> and sport 2 without problems with both google chrome and openjdk without
>> problems.
> 
> With openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin openjdk-6-jdk and either Firefox
> 3.6.24 or Chromium 15.0.874.106 (Developer Build 107270 Linux) Ubuntu
> 10.04 the following sketch applet (or ANY other on openprocessing.org)
> does not display:
> 
> http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=39078

I've got a fairly stock ubuntu 11.10 box with chrome 16.0.912.75 and it
works just fine.   I just clicked the above URL and waited a few
seconds.  Not sure whats happening flocks of small things fly around in
different colors and obliterate the large green rectangles that seem to
regrow.

It's a pretty big window compared to the demos I tried. Seems to use
50-60% of a CPU or so to keep it running.

I'm using google chrome 16.0.912.75 and:
bill at left:~$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_23"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11pre) (6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

Watch top it was obvious that it was process 1309:
bill at left:~$ ls -al /proc/1309/exe
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bill bill 0 2012-01-10 22:06 /proc/1309/exe ->
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java
bill at left:~$ dpkg -S /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java
openjdk-6-jre-headless: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java

Works great.

> This is a known issue:
> "OpenJDK and IcedTea are also unlikely to work, however we'll update
> this as those projects progress. "
> From http://wiki.processing.org/w/Supported_Platforms#Linux

Ya, saw that, seems out of date to  me.

> So, if it is working for you, then there must be some install magic
> changes between 10.04 and 11.10, which for me, justifies an upgrade.

Personally I'd suggest linux mint, I suspect unity will drive you nuts
if you are used to 10.04.  I was a big ubuntu fan for many releases, but
the new release is just insulting.  They broke compiz, gnome-terminal,
they broke the gui, things don't work unless you use click to focus, and
it's REALLY annoying on a large monitor let alone 2.

Linux mint is just a few packages and then most of the packages still
come from ubuntu, they just leave out the broken bits.

On a netbook or tablet I think unity would work well, on 1 or 2 20-24"
monitors not so much.