Installing Thortspace on Linux
This is a quick guide through the installation of Thortspace for Linux. This is still not very widely tested and feedback is very welcome.
Exciting news! Thortspace 1.5.3 for Linux was released on 4th March 2019
Prerequisites
The main prerequisite for running Thortspace for Linux is a 64-bit Linux distribution. Most current machines are 64-bit and many Linux installs are this now. If you’re not sure, you can give it a try.
In addition to this, you’ll need working 3D graphics drivers for it to run at a good speed. If you find Thortspace runs very slow for you, it may be worth researching whether there are alternative video drivers you can install.
Thortspace includes all its known dependencies bundled, so shouldn’t require any software dependencies. It has not been tested on older distributions yet, however, and Ubuntu 16.04 or something more recent is recommended.
1. Download
The first step in installing Thortspace on Linux is to download it from the thortspace website. Navigate to https://medium.com/thortspace/get-the-thortspace-app-65188b6216f6 and you should see something like the following picture.
Click the “Download Linux tarball” link for the Linux version. You may see a prompt like the below picture; if so, click to save the file, and then click OK.
Once the file has downloaded, navigate to it in your file manager.
Linux tarball hash for thortspace-1.4.83.tar.bz2
SHA256 is 2FFF22488FAE32E0D69BD7638C481FDF78F70E17FCA4A27A0066259C77436520
Linux tarball hash for thortspace-1.5.3.tar.bz2
SHA256 is 70C9D7EB05B9F0D6E40AD1DE82291389942499E573DED1E0F124692C390B845B
2. Extract
Extract the .tar.bz2 file to get a folder containing Thortspace. This may be available on the right-click menu as in the below screenshot, depending on your Linux distribution, or you may need to use an archive manager.
3. Run
Once it has been extracted, navigate into the folder to see the Thortspace software. Double click on the “thortspace” file to launch Thortspace, as shown below.
Thortspace will launch. You will see an opening screen like the below screenshot.
If you are new to the product, click “Start Here” to view links to a range of tutorials.
Thortspace Account Login
If you have an existing Thortspace account (free or Premium), you can login by clicking on the “My Account” button in the top right. If you do, you will see a dialog box like the following.
Enter your username and password, then click login, and you will be logged into your account.
Addenda 1: (from the release instructions) that are in a text file included in the download package:
At present, due to its early stage of development, installing Thortspace on Linux requires being comfortable:
* handling package management
* resolving dependencies, and
* using a terminal,
The steps to run it are outlined as follows:
1) Install dependencies
An initial list of dependencies based on Debian, Ubuntu, and derived distribution package names is:
- libalut0
- libglu1-mesa
- libopenal1
- libx11–6
- libxi6
Depending on distribution, packages may have different names or be split up differently. If any of these are incompatible with your system you can try without and see if an alternative package is providing a replacement library.
Feedback on the steps needed to enable Thortspace to run on different distributions is very welcome.
2) Try to run the “thortspace” program.
If this doesn’t work, open a terminal window and navigate to the location you extracted this copy of Thortspace to, and enter “./thortspace” to see if it prints any errors, which may indicate missing dependencies, problems with 3D rendering, or other issues.
Some functionality, such as copy and paste and drag and drop in and out of the product, is currently unavailable due to lacking the necessary platform-specific implementation. This, along with packaging for automated install, application shortcuts, and similar, are things intended to be included in later stages of development of the Linux version.
Addenda 2: Bob Clark’s Feedback running Thortspace 1.4.81 on Linux Mint 19.1
See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thortspace/permalink/2194460003935524/
“Works great! Solves the crashing problem on my gobstopper sphere, as anticipated.
Just a note for executing instructions: my distro (Mint 19.1) doesn’t have a ‘Run’ context menu in the file browser. Linux wants to be CLI.
In Linux I’d forego anything but running it from the command line in the instructions until and if ever it’s integrated with (a) GUI.
Linux users aren’t so dependant on the 🐁. And there are at least a dozen different GUI’s in Linux to talk about (KDE, Gnome, Xwindows, etc.). Matlab doesn’t even try Linux GUI integration and Mathworks is a 10,000x bigger operation than y’all. ”
