No vassal launch

Technical Support & Bugs
1

HI there!
I am a newcomer on this forum, and an old user of vassal (with vasl).
I recently had to change my system to ubuntu 22.10.
System is AMD64; 8 GB of RAM.
I installed openjdk on it (version 19).
When I run vassal.sh, the terminal opens, my HDD is running, but after 2 seconds, the terminal closes, without any error message. And obviously, no vassal running at all!
Could someone help?
Many thanks.
Eric

2

You probably have a headless version of Java installed (one with no GUI capabilities).

What does java --version print when you run it in a terminal?

3

Hi Uckelman,

here is the result of java --version:

eric@eric-K53SD:~$ java --version
openjdk 19.0.1 2022-10-18
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 19.0.1+10-Ubuntu-1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.0.1+10-Ubuntu-1, mixed mode, sharing)

Many thanks for your help!

4

I’m not entirely sure what the right package names are on Ubuntu. What output do you get from apt list --installed | grep 'openjdk\|java'?

5

Hi!
Here ti is

eric@eric-K53SD:~$ apt list --installed | grep ‘openjdk|java’

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

ca-certificates-java/kinetic,kinetic,now 20220719 all [installé, automatique]
gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-4.0/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 2.38.3-0ubuntu0.22.10.1 amd64 [installé, automatique]
gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-4.1/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 2.38.3-0ubuntu0.22.10.1 amd64 [installé, automatique]
java-common/kinetic,kinetic,now 0.72build2 all [installé, automatique]
libjavascriptcoregtk-4.0-18/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 2.38.3-0ubuntu0.22.10.1 amd64 [installé, automatique]
libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-0/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 2.38.3-0ubuntu0.22.10.1 amd64 [installé, automatique]
libjavascriptcoregtk-5.0-0/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 2.38.3-0ubuntu0.22.10.1 amd64 [installé, automatique]
openjdk-19-jre-headless/kinetic-updates,kinetic-security,now 19.0.1+10-1 amd64 [installé]
eric@eric-K53SD:~$

Thanks

6

This one is the problem. You have a headless version of Java 19 installed, so it can’t bring up a GUI when you try to run Vassal.

Check if there’s a package you can install called openjdk-19-jre. (That’s my guess about what it will be called based on the name of the headless version.) If there is, install that and try running Vassal.

7

Well done Uckelman !
It works !!
Just not to end this thread without any “lessons learned”, can you tell me as simply as you can what is the difference between normal and headless java version?
Many thanks again !
eric

1 Like
8

Headless Java has no GUI capabilities compiled in. It’s intended for use on servers where there’s no display on which to show a GUI. No GUI support means no need for the dependencies that provide the GUI, so it’s a smaller, lighter weight install—but only in situations where you don’t actually need the GUI.

The normal version has GUI support, and consequently has more dependencies.

1 Like
9

Many Thanks !!!
Thread closed.