Get Myrtle In Your University's Computer Lab

With many thanks to Mikolaj Izdebski, a software engineer at RedHat, Myrtle has now been made available on Fedora Linux. "Why is this a good thing?" you might ask. Well, Fedora is probably the single most popular Linux distribution in university computer labs today. So if you happen to be a teacher or student at a college or university, chances are there is now a 100% free way to get Myrtle running on those computers. Fedora and Myrtle are freely available which makes it perfect for many school or classroom budgets.  To find out more about Fedora Linux (or even try it out) click here. 

If your computer lab has a system administrator, simply ask them about installing Myrtle for you.  On the other hand, if you are a "do-it-yourself" type and would like to install Myrtle on your system, simply follow one of these simple approaches:  

1.  Use Gnome's Software Updater

    Type "myrtle" into Software Update's search bar to find the latest available package release.
   
   
   
   
   Then, just click "Install Package."

2.  Command Line Using Yum

   On the other hand, if you prefer to work from the command line, just open a terminal window.  At the prompt type the following:

yum -y install myrtle

which would download the latest stable release.  If instead you'd like to get the very latest bleeding-edge release use:

yum -y --enablerepo="updates-testing" install myrtle

Launching Myrtle's .jar File On Linux/Unix Systems

Windows users are lucky since the Myrtle .exe file will launch Myrtle from a desktop or a flash drive with no problems.  However, if you happen to be one of those individuals running a Linux/Unix-based OS like Ubuntu, RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, etc. you may have had some difficulty.  You may already know that you can launch the Myrtle spreadsheet executable jar file from a terminal (i.e. xterm) or shell using a command like:

java -jar Myrtle-1.8.11.jar

However, you may have encountered difficulty running Myrtle from within a graphical file browser like Nautilus. This is useful if you want to quickly run Myrtle off of a USB flash drive for example and don't want to bother opening an xterm.  Unfortunately, the default Nautilus behavior is to treat a .jar file as a file archive and it will open and start browsing its contents for you...  Often not what you want to see.

For those on Linux/Unix running a Gnome-based desktop, try the following trick.  Copy the following file to your  ~/.local/share/applications folder where '~' represents your home directory path.

Save the following in a text file named execjar.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Exec=java -jar %f
#You may need to modify icon tag
#to suit your system.
Icon=java-1.7.0
Name=execjar
Comment=Run an executable jar file

From Nautilus you will now be able to "right-click" on the jar file (e.g. Myrtle-1.8.11.jar) that you want to run and then select Open With-->Other Application...  Select execjar from the list and Myrtle will launch. That's it!

Using the above method you are in fact able to launch any executable jar file when needed, but still be able to browse .jar file contents according to the default behavior of Nautilus when wanted.