Ok, this is probably an easy one, but I searched and couldn’t find. Running a Chromebook with android Version 118.0.5993.124 (Official Build) (64-bit). Enabled linux, downloaded the linux files and unpacked. How do I execute the vassal.sh file? I am a first time linux user. Sincere apologies if I’ve missed something obvious. Usually google will provide an answer, but too many unknowns for me to decipher.
I dd successfully install Java per the instructions as well.
You run VASSAL.sh in a terminal, like any shell script. E.g., from the directory where, VASSAL.sh, is:
./VASSAL.sh
Success! There was a little more to it than executing, I found out, but after a few hundred trial and errors, got it working. Joel, thanks for the help, it gave me enough of a clue that I could keep going. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Really appreciated.
Would you mind explaining what you did, for anyone else who sees this thread?
Sure, should have thought of that too. Basically, I had to:
The breakthrough was really #2, once I had that, was just a matter of navigating to the right place.
I’ve gotten so used to point and click that my command line skills were seriously rusty. And to think at one time, that’s how we all worked.
Once again, the community saves the day! 
Would like to add for other Linux beginners like myself that, depending on your distro or desktop environment, you may be able to add Vassal to the equivalent of the Start menu and not have to rely exclusively on the terminal to launch the program.
In Linux Mint Cinnamon edition for example, I was able to do that by right clicking on the start button, then click Configure, then select Menu tab, then click Open The Menu Editor where you will see a list of Applications categories. One can click Games, then New Item, then give it a name like Vassal, browse to and choose the Vassal.sh file in the Command input box, then add a checkmark to Launch in Terminal?, then click the icon on the upper left and browse to and select the Vassal.svg file for the custom icon and then finally click OK to finish.
Now, you will see Vassal with its custom icon in your menu under Games as well as All Applications to make it easy to launch Vassal without the terminal. It’s convenient for keyboard focused use as well since you can just hit the Super key and start to type V-A and the menu selection should come up automatically for easy selection without using a mouse.
This is a test for RobS.
i bought a Chromebook to play vassal on. i didn’t realise it wasn’t straight forward using Linux. does anybody know if there are any step by step guides to setting it up ? my Chromebook has almost gone out the window a couple of times ! :))
Yes i get exactly the same result as Robert1 did in the thread
I am going from my experience muddling through it, but from the result you referenced, I think you have to navigate to the directory where the file is to run it like that. for example, on mine the file is located at /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/VASSAL. You can see where the downloaded file is in the Files app.
Sorry if you knew this already, but I had the problem, and just needed to understand the file structure in the chromebook. I hope this helps.
my file is here /mnt/chromeos/archive/VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2/VASSAL-3.7.6
but i dont know what to do with this infomation
im out of my depth here i dont know what im doing
you probably need to extract the files in the tar.bz2 file. It looks like you are trying to run VASSAL while it is still in the tar and zipped file.
Try this:
from your prompt: cd /mnt/chromeos/archive
You should then see the name of that directory come up. Then run the tar command to unzip. You have to be in the same directory as the file you’re unzipping, and this should get you there.
I think chromebook comes with a GUI 
(My interface is in french but it’s easy to understand what’s going on)
Maybe the /mnt/chromeos/archive directory is not a user directory, i expected something like “/home/dan77/Downloads/VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2”
Hi there,
A few things on VASSAL and GNU/Linux (including ChromeBooks).
When you download VASSAL it will typically end up in ~/Downloads as something like VASSAL-3.7.8-linux.tar.bz2.
~/ means your home directory - typically something like /home/user nameThe rest will use the terminal. To open a terminal open your application menu and search for Terminal.
To navigate to your home directory, simple do one of
cd
cd ~
cd $HOME
cd /home/$USER
To go to your Downloads directory, do one of
cd ~/Downloads
cd $HOME/Downloads
cd /home/$USER
There’s no concept of drives on Un*x. Filesystems, whether on disk, remote, or an archive are mounted into the filesystems rooted in - well - the root /
To see the currently mounted filesystems, do
mount
F.ex, /mnt/chromeos/archive/VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2 is a compressed archive (probably from ~/Downloads/VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2 mounted (the /mnt at start of the path is a clue).
Incidently, when a MacOSX user clicks a disk image .dmg, this is also what MacOSX does - mounts the archive as if it was a disk.
In principle, you can run programs, etc. from a mounted archive, but there will be an overhead since the system needs to unpack the archive in memory. So a better option is to unpack the archive somewhere more permanent.
To install VASSAL properly, go to your downloads directory
cd ~/Downloads
Decide where you want to install VASSAL. For the sake of the example, say you want to install it into ~/applications. First we make that directory if it isn’t there already
mkdir -p ~/applications
The option -p means make all parents and do not fail if any part of the path already exists.
Next we should unpack the cmpressed archive to its install locations
bzip2 -dc VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2 | tar -xf - -C ~/applications
Here,
bzip -dc decompresses the file to standard output (the screen)| or FIFO, connects the output of the application on the left to the standard input (keyboard) on the righttar -xf - unpacks the archive read from standard input (-) and the option -C ~/applications says that it should be unpacked in the directory ~/applicationsYou will now have the directory
~/applications/VASSAL-3.7.6
which contains the file VASSAL.sh.
Thus, you can launch VASSAL from anywhere with
~/applications/VASSAL-3.7.6/VASSAL.sh
It’s a bit cumbersome, so let’s make it a bit easier .
Go to the ~/applications directory
cd ~/applications
Make a symbolic link from VASSAL-3.7.6 to VASSAL
ln -s VASSAL-3.7.6 VASSAL
VASSAL is now a filesystem entry that behaves exactly like VASSAL-3.7.6 but is not a copy.
If you later on install an upgrade to VASSAL in the same directory - say VASSAL-3.9.99, you can simply redefine the link
rm VASSAL
ln -s VASSAL-3.9.99 VASSAL
Now you can execute VASSAL from anywhere by
~/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh
but that’s still a mouth full, so let’s make it even easier.
Go to your home directory
cd
Open the file ~/.bash_aliases with your favorite editor
xdg-open ~/.bash_aliases
Type in into that file
alias vassal=$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh
and save the file.
Now close your current terminal and open a new one. Type
alias
You will see a list of currently defined aliases - i.e., short-cuts to execute something - and one of them should be vassal. You can now launch VASSAL with
vassal
from anywhere.
Note, you cannot do
vassal SomeModule.vmod
because VASSAL changes the current directory to its installation directory (see also this bug report). You need to give the full path to the module, which is easily done by
vassal `pwd`/SomeModule.vmod
Here, the backticks ``evaluates the command pwd (print-working-directory) and puts the result on the command-line before executing the command line.
Note you will typically not see the file ~/.bash_aliases when you list files in the current directory
ls
because the file name starts with a dot .. To see all files, pass the option
ls -a
The above does not register VASSAL and VASSAL module files as connected. To do that, you need to register a custom mime-type and a handler for that mimetype.
To register the mimetype, make the file ~/.local/share/mime/packages/applications-x-vassal.xml with the content
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mime-info xmlns='http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info'>
<mime-type type="application/x-vassal-module">
<comment>VASSAL module file</comment>
<glob pattern="*.vmod"/>
</mime-type>
<mime-type type="application/x-vassal-log">
<comment>VASSAL log file</comment>
<glob pattern="*.vlog"/>
</mime-type>
<mime-type type="application/x-vassal-save">
<comment>VASSAL save file</comment>
<glob pattern="*.vsav"/>
</mime-type>
and then run
update-mime-database
Next, create the file ~/.local/share/applications/vassal.desktop with the content
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
MimeType=application/x-vassal-module;application/x-vassal-log;application/x-vassal-save
Name=VASSAL
Exec=$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh
Icon=$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.svg
Actions=Run;Edit;
[Desktop Action Run]
Name=Run
Exec=$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh -l %f
[Desktop Action Edit]
Name=Edit
Exec=$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh -e %f
and run
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
Note that you may need to replace $HOME above with the path to your home directory. To figure out what that is do
echo $HOME
It will typically report something like /home/user name. For the user foo it would typically be
/home/foo
and the edit should be
$HOME/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh -> /home/foo/applications/VASSAL/VASSAL.sh
Now, you should be able to double-click a VASSAL module, save file, or log file in your favorite file-browser to launch VASSAL with that file. You will also be able to launch VASSAL from your application menu.
@uckelman Perhaps you could distribute the above mime and desktop files with VASSAL?
Ideally, all this would be done for you automatically when you install VASSAL. However, since VASSAL does not come as a distribution package (.deb, .rpm, …) these steps are unfortunately needed for better desktop integration.
Hope the above is useful to some.
Yours,
Christian
Much simpler is:
tar -xvf VASSAL-3.7.6-linux.tar.bz2
Any remotely modern version of tar automatically detects bzip2 compression.
There was actually a point to showing how one can pipe-line several small applications into a larger whole. That’s really the power of the command line. But of course, you are right that it is simpler, albeit less pædagogical 
Will you add these small files to the distribution? Perhaps with a script like (named e.g., desktop-integration.sh or something like that)
#!/bin/sh
dest=/usr/local
mode=install
usage() {
echo "Usage: $0 [install|uninstall] [--user|--system|--destination PREFIX]"
}
while test $# -gt 0 ; do
case $1 in
-h|--help) usage ; exit 0 ;;
install) mode=install ;;
uninstall) mode=uninstall ;;
-u|--user) dest=$HOME/.local ;;
-s|--system) dest=/usr/local ;;
-d|--destination) dest=$2 ; shift ;;
*) echo "$0: Unknown argument: $1" ; exit 1 ;;
esac
shift
done
if test "x$mode" == "xinstall" ; then
EXEC_PATH=$(realpath "$0")
INSTALL_DIR=$(dirname "${EXEC_PATH}")
sed "s|$$INSTALL_DIR|$INSTALL_DIR|" < vassal.desktop > tmp.desktop
sed "s|$$INSTALL_DIR|$INSTALL_DIR|" < applications-x-vassal.xml > tmp.xml
mkdir -p $dest/applications
mkdir -p $dest/mime/packages
mkdir -p $dest/bin
mv tmp.desktop $dest/applications/vassal.desktop
mv tmp.xml $dest/mime/packages/application-x-vassal.xml
update-mime-database $dest/mime
update-desktop-database $dest/
(cd $dest/bin && ln -s $EXEC_PATH vassal)
else
rm -f $dest/mime/packages/application-x-vassal.xml
rm -f $dest/applications/vassal.desktop
rm -f $dest/bin/vassal
rmdir -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty $dest/applications
rmdir -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty $dest/mime/packages
rmdir -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty $dest/bin
fi
A user can then easily install the integration - either system-wide or for the user only.
Yours,
Christian
It would be preferable to distribute a .deb and a .rpm for people who want them; I suspect hardly anyone would use a desktop integration script manually.
I always learn something when someone more experienced shows a way to do something with a script or in the command line. I described a much simpler way to add Vassal to the menu on Linux Mint Cinnamon earlier in the thread. I assume it would work similarly for others to add a menu entry for Vassal to their Linux laptop or desktop in other distros and desktop environments.