Running vZome on Linux

As of vZome 6.0 build 22, we will now be shipping a Linux version of vZome.

This is a simpler distribution than either the Mac or Windows variant, since it does not include its own Java Runtime Environment. It is simply a ZIP file. Unzip it and you will find bin and lib folders. In the bin folder, you will find the launch script, named “vZome-6.0”.

If you have not installed Java on your Linux machine, you will see something like this when you run the script:

You can download the JRE from Oracle. You’ll end up with a file like “jre-8u162-linux-x64.tar.gz”. Assuming the file was saved to your Downloads folder, you can unpack it as follows:

cd ~/Downloads
tar xzvf jre-8u162-linux-x64.tar.gz

This will leave you with a folder named ~/Downloads/jre1.8.0_162. To enable the vZome launch script, all you have to do is set the JAVA_HOME environment variable appropriately, before running the script:

export JAVA_HOME=~/Downloads/jre1.8.0_162

We won’t be providing many guarantees about this distribution, since we don’t have the time to do a lot of testing on Linux. I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and I did some basic sanity testing of vZome 6.0 build 22. Most features seem to work fine, but there is a nasty bug associated with article mode. Since the first thing you see will be the “quick-start” article, this bug may cause a crash right away. Launch vZome again, and you’ll end up with a new document; if you stay out of article mode thereafter, you should be OK.