Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am helping my father get his Debian install to a livable level. Let’s get started!
Reality Checks and Cancellations
My goal with talking my father through a Linux install is to grow my own abilities as well, but our time together is often limited, leaving little room for research during our work sessions.
Debian Testing sounded like a good idea until we started reading about it. I knew there would be warnings, but the booklet worth of information about special care it required was more than a little intimidating. It’s still something I’d like to try some day, just not when back seat computing.
Likewise, setting up a Windows look-alike desktop environment was beyond the scope of our allotted time. The selection I had located were simply themes build upon actual desktop environments. Again: something I’d like to try when I have a machine to do more advance research on.
A lot of our work this week was spent reading on these canceled side projects. We unfortunately had to reduce our scope, but we now understand our limitations better for it.
MultiMC with GraalVM
Overall, my family’s favorite game is Minecraft. I’m trying to move the family away from the default launcher, so we installed MultiMC, a third party launcher that doesn’t confuse your versions.
One download option for MultiMC is a .deb file labeled as if for Ubuntu. I improved a little on the installation when trying to install it locally with aptitude, apt, and finally dpkg. We had to look up how to address dependencies. While it wasn’t painless, it wasn’t memorable either, but it was one example of why straight Debian may not be the best for someone looking to get into Linux without a guide.
Minecraft uses Java. The current version uses the relatively new Java 16, which isn’t a common find on Debian based systems unless purposefully installed. Graal is my preferred open source version of Java, and they have experimental builds for Java 16. With my recent return to the game, I’ve done the following procedure a few times already.
Graal can be downloaded from their GitHub. They provide builds for both amd64 or aarch64 architectures. We didn’t happen to know which one we needed, so we just choose one with a mental note to be prepared in case it wasn’t recognized, which it wasn’t. While Graal will work from anywhere as long as it’s called, the proper place to install it is in /usr/lib/jvm/. On my other installations, the jvm/ directory already existed and was host to other Java installations, but this time we had to make it ourselves. MultiMC recognized Graal shortly after properly installing it properly.
Takeaway
There’s a special feeling when you can reference your own work for solutions to problems you’ve already solved. The standard Java path is something that took me a while to learn, and I still had to look it up on my own system while writing. A week or two ago, I was happy to dump Graal wherever I could find it –one instance was even running it from my Downloads directory– but it’s best to put utilities on a computer where others can expect to find them.
In the meantime, we are practicing terminal with that… hard to read terminal emulator that came with LXDE. My father tried to change the colors, but his settings didn’t stick on restarting the program.
Final Question
Have you ever self-referenced for answers?