Hi Folks,
I am volunteering with a school environment dealing with 8-12th graders learning to program and I’ve spent the better part of yesterday afternoon and this morning testing various configurations of Linux and Xojo for a “best Experience” environment. We’re using a combination of Java and Xojo to provide a balanced look for students at different non-commercial (note that I didn’t say Open Source) platforms and I’ve been setting up systems to determine the most stable and functional environments in a Linux-based realm. Hopefully this may help others to build a stable platform for Xojo under Linux.
The systems involved vary from older 2.4GHz 2nd Gen i3 to new 4th Gen i7 systems. All have been configured with 8GB of RAM and Nvidia GTX750 video cards and 1TB Seagate 7200RPM drives.
I’ve tested multiple releases of 5 different Linux distros with various desktop environments.
After all of this, here’s the layout that we will be loading (remember, this is for students and stability is more important that the latest and greatest):
- Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS 32bit
- Xojo 13r4.1
- Oracle Java 8u101
- Netbeans 8.1
- Cinnamon 2.8 Desktop
To perform the installation, I followed these steps:
- Install Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS 32bit
- Update to the latest version of the platform
- Configure the Cinnamon PPA repository and install Cinnamon 2.8:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:moorkai/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon -y- Install the libwebkitgtk-dev that isn’t installed by default, but required by Xojo:
sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-dev -y- Download and install Xojo 13r4.1 dpkg from the Xojo archives.
- Create the Student user account
- Image the drive for recovery
The result is a very stable and snappy platform for both Xojo and Java.
BTW - I did load and test the Xojo 16r3 platform, but there were still some glitches in the IDE that I don’t have time to sort right now. They may be Linux/Desktop or Xojo, but that’s a task for another weekend.