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Adding Alice
Question:
Hello, I'm a teacher who would like to familiarize my students more with Alice (Randy Pausch's visual programming language), yet I can't reliably work with it at home. Any ideas on the best way to get Alice visual programming language to work in Linux? Thank you. Don Davis
Answer:
In general, look for software specifically for your operating system. After a short search, some Debian packages showed up for Alice. If you add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file,
deb http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/download/debian stable contrib
you should be able to install the (old) version 1.4 of the programming language's run-time environment with the following command:
sudo aptitude install alice-runtime
At least for Debian/Lenny (and Knoppix), this seems to work.
Under "Alice 3 beta" at the developer's website [3], you can also find a Linux "offline installer" for version 3 [4]. At 516MB, it is amazingly large, and I did not look inside. This beta installer is a self-extracting shell script that can be run by typing the following after download:
sh Alice3BetaInstaller-Complete-3.0.0.0.61-linux.sh
Alice is a 3D framework for Java with its own visual development platform – similar to Eclipse – so you probably only need to have Java and a few Java extensions (Beans) installed as a prerequisite. This is just a guess, though. If you try the beta, please let me know whether it worked. :-)
Note: Make sure you have the most recent stable JRE installed. The best compatibility is usually reached with Sun Microsystems Java [5].
Infos
- Knoppix source repository: http://debian-knoppix.alioth.debian.org/
- nVidia: http://www.nvidiadriver.org/
- Alice developer website: http://www.alice.org/
- Alice offline installer: http://kenai.com/projects/alice/downloads/directory/Alice%203.0.0.0.61
- Java: http://java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp?locale=en&host=java.com:80
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