Linux feedback

[justme]

Finally got around to installing this one Ubuntu 10.10.

I've only had a few minutes to play with this, so expect more in-depth feedback shortly.

Downloaded the .jar, made it exec and ran it.
Install dialog and installation went as expected, except for one thing.
The JPortal shotcuts were not placed in the Games category (on the main menu), but was put in under Others.
No biggie.

Running the game has proven a bit more painfull.
The first attempts resulted in error messages in the terminal, and some Java processes hanging.

I killed the processes and resettet X Wins, and could start the game.
Unfortunately it ran very slowly, and froze in my first game after I declined a mulligan. Again I had to kill the process.

As I said above, I only had little time to play with this. I'll try and provide better feedback, once Iøve had a chance to tinker some more under the hood.

This was on a Thinkpad T43, 1.8Ghz, 1GB ram running Ubuntu 10.10

[Malban]

Hiho,

while I could look at the installation issue - this ist only a minor problem - as you yourself noted.

The other problem is more serious - and I am at a loss what to do about it. I chose Java for two reasons:
- I like Java
- it is platform independend (this is one reason I like it)

If a java program behaves differently on two platforms it should not be the fault of the programer. At least if you don´t use any native libraries or do other hardware dependend stuff.

Both of them I don´t do - and is not needed in a game like JPortal.

It is bad enough that JPortal needs Sun´s java distribution and doesn´t work correctly with another, but if even that fails I must sadly admit:

"Java fails in platform independence"

I might at some time power up my VMWare UBuntu distribution to look into it. But at this stage I am very dissappointed in Java.

If I know bevorhand that I must write platform dependend code I can easily adjust - I would have used e.g. SDL libraries and written JPortal as CPortal in C or rather c++.

Malban

[justme]

But at this stage I am very dissappointed in Java.

Hahahaha, now you sound like my boss. He wants to get rid of Java, because he finds it faulty (we build enterprise systems in J2E ... I test them).

There can be a variety of reasons why JPortal performs so poorly on my system:
> hardware limitations (Java does have bad memory handling *cough* garbage collector)
> The JRE might need some tweaking (eg. ln -s /home/myuser/java1.6 /usr/bin/java seem to fix a lot of problems for other Ubuntu users)
> Maybe installing a JDK instead of just the runtime libs will help

I'll look into some of these, and see what I can come up with.

[Julgot2]

I've tried JPortal 1.0 on my Debian sid system with openjdk, which did not seem to work.

However, JPortal 1.2 seems to run ok with opendjk. I've encountered the occasional glitch, sound effects go wrong fairly often, but the game is playable.