JR is much better at PC stuff in general, so I am sure he can improve this and certainly explain it better. I bow to his skill/knowledge of course.
3) To make running things a 'bit' easier, you can let Linux know where you have files you want to be able to run. Basically this way, you can open up the terminal and just type VASSAL.sh similar to other commands in typically executable directories. For example, a lot of your executable binaries are probably in /usr/bin. A lot of the files may be symbolic links or the actual files themselves.
You probably don't want to move VASSAL.sh there as you will probably lose it on an upgrade/reinstall, but you can tell Linux that you want to run files located in a sub-directory of your 'home' folder, which is fairly easy to preserve during upgrades or by just doing a backup.
I suggest learning a text editor if you 'really' want to get down with Linux (vim or emacs), but you can use the default text editor for your distribution.
Again, open your terminal (CTRL-ALT-T) and there is probably a configuration file there that gets loaded every time you start up a new terminal. gedit is similar to notepad on your Windows. It might be something else, but finding your "Text Editor" should help.
cp .bashrc .bashrc-20180403 (do a quick backup in case of trouble)
mkdir ~/bin (this makes the directory where we will put your custom executable files. ~ is short for /home/<username> for your personal stuff)
gedit .bashrc
In there you will find a bunch of stuff, but lines that start with a # (or 'she') are comments and will be ignored. Here is the text I use to add a 'bin' folder to my PATH. $PATH is a special variable that tells Linux where to look for your executables. Mint gives you some locations by default, so you want to keep those, but add ~/bin which is where we will locate your VASSAL.sh (or similar). Add this to the beginning or after the beginning comments marked with a #
# Add ~/bin/ to the PATH
PATH=~/bin/:$PATH
export PATH
$PATH is the one that Linux gave you originally, but we add ~/bin/ to the list. The colon is important to separate the two variables/locations. This won't get loaded until you restart your terminal.
Exit your terminal and restart it to have the changes load. No need to log out, just type exit and press enter, then do a new CTRL-ALT-T to get a terminal up.
4) Go into the new directory
cd bin
gedit VASSAL (this will make the file and I just skip the .sh as I know this is a script and unlike Windows, the Linux reads the file to determine what it is instead of relying on the extension to tell it what to do)
The next part might be a bit tricky, but paste this into the new "VASSAL" file. Again, things starting with # are comments (Well, #! is a bit different, but don't worry about that first line too much). It is just a copy of VASSAL.sh that already works for you. The screenshot should help you. Don't worry about the coloring of the text inside your text editor. Mine will certainly be different.
== Copy below, but not this line ==
#!/bin/sh -ex
#
# Execute this file to launch VASSAL on MacOS or Linux
#
# Find absolute path where VASSAL is installed
#INSTALL_DIR=$(cd "$(dirname "$0")"; pwd)
INSTALL_DIR=/home/weflemi/Dropbox/VASSAL/
# Launch VASSSAL
java -Duser.dir="$INSTALL_DIR" -classpath "$INSTALL_DIR"/lib/Vengine.jar VASSAL.launch.ModuleManager "$@"
== Copy above, not this line ==
For you, you will have to change the INSTALL_DIR to where you put VASSAL. It might be /home/<username>/Downloads/VASSAL-3.2.17/
The blue line is the original. You can try removing the # to turn it from a comment into a line that will be read/executed and put a # in front of the red line so that one is not. For me, I have to tell VASSAL exactly where it is.
Again, make this file executable
chmod +x ~/bin/VASSAL
If the install location figures itself out (blue) or if you tell it exactly where VASSAL is (red) and it works, you should be able to type this in a terminal anywhere now (no need for using the ./VASSAL.sh or similar)
VASSAL
That is basically where I have things right now. I have had it so that a desktop icon would start VASSAL when you double clicked it, but the way that works seems to change a lot and gets lost on upgrades. There are some extensions that allow you to just hit a key ` (the upper left key on most keyboards) and a drop-down terminal will open for you. Type VASSAL there and hit ` again to hide the drop down terminal.
Basically, I type ` VASSAL ` to start it up. You can be lazier and use tab-complete to get it going with ` VA<tab> `
If you don't have the extension for the drop-down terminal, you can do CTRL-ALT-T -> VASSAL and get there just fine.
The tab complete will have Linux look through all your executable directories (and we added ~/bin/ for ours) and try to figure it out for you or to give you suggestions if it finds multiple options. Type fire<tab> and it will complete with 'firefox' for example. If there is more than one option, you may need to type a few more keys to limit the options Linux has to choose from. Maybe you need to do VASS<tab>. Tab complete can help you a lot more than that too as Linux does a good job of trying to figure out what you want, but look that up as you desire.
I hope that helps. I might try to figure out how to make a desktop icon for it again, but probably am too lazy. 5 keystokes and no mouse clicks is fast enough for me to get VASSAL started up.
Future topic:
If you want to continue down the rabbit hole and take Morpheus's "blue pill", we can setup some symbolic links to make the upgrades a bit easier. There really are not many updates these days, so I don't think that is critical however.
Future topic 2:
Also, if you dual boot or use two PC's, you can put the files inside of Dropbox or a similar service and when I update an extension or add boards, logfiles or whatever, it gets synched across all my PC's for me.
As you learn more about the power and freedom that Linux gives you, please share with others.
Edit: here is a video that kind of explains .bashrc and talks about changing your $PATH variable.
