Runescape old school and Linux

A while ago the Java plugin I was using in Pale Moon stopped working.  Nothing on the part of Pale Moon, but, the plugin isn't supported anymore.  That wouldn't be a problem except I play Runescape Old School on it and I was forced to use my Windows 10 machine until I figured out how to get it to work again.

I played around with various settings and even tried to launch it from the command line without any luck.  I then checked into the Runescape forums with the search on 'LINUX' and I found a thread (quick link 278-279-207-66116400) describing how to search for 'RuneScape Unix Client'.  I did a search on the web and found in GitHub a client.  I didn't want to try this on my main Linux box just in case, but, the Win10 box I am running virtual machine software and I had MX linux running on it too.  I followed the GitHub instructions (running as root for Debian) and when it was done I had a working Runescape client.  You do have to be patient (especially for getting the keys). 

There seems to be a difference in what I have in the VM and my main box as I couldn't find the Runescape client launch in the menu.  I realized that was the one machine I haven't moved to MX, but, ANTIX.  I had to do a backup of my documents and rebuilt so that every machine in the house works with one version of Linux.  Once it was working I installed the client and it worked...

RS Client with OSRS picked

OSRS Welcome screen

Fixing up MX Linux application menu entries

Last week I did something that messed up the entries in the application menu.  I had the full menu duplicated four times and I don't know what I did to make the duplicates.  I looked at the Update Menu option, but, it didn't remove the duplicate entries.

I use MX Linux for the machine now as I want every Linux box in the house to use one distro to make my work easier having only one distro.  I originally had the netbook and my main box with ANTIX, the wife's machine with MINT and the media tower with PCLINUXOS.  They are all great distros, but, I had to pick one and MX worked on all machines right from the start (One wouldn't boot, another wouldn't recognize the hardware in the netbook and the other had minor issues with the video).

When I started to research what happened to the menu I went through the forums and the only thing I could see is that I can manually edit the menu applications file.

If you have to manually modify this file here are a few important things to keep in mind:

1. Everything you do will have to be as root.
2. Make a backup of the file before you touch it.
3. Take it slow, don't rush what you are doing.

You can find your application menu in /usr/share/desktop-menu/.icewm.  Use what ever file manager you are comfortable with.

Folder with icewm application menu

As you can see I made a backup of the file before editing.  I then edited the file as root.

Edit as root

Once in edit mode I manually removed the duplicated entries.  It took me a couple of updates as there were entries in what I selected that were not installed (my fault there as I picked the wrong duplicated group to remove).  Once you save the file the application menu is immediately updated.

Manually editing the application menu

As you can see the menu appears and I don't have the duplicated menu entries any more.

MX Application Menu

The preferable way is to let the system do the work for you updating the menus, but, if something does get messed up you do have a way to manually edit the menu entries.

Update 2019/08/31
Looks like MX 18 has changed things around and the above won't work.  I have to figure it out and record how to manually do this.  I prefer one spot and one format and old school text editors to make changes like this. It does have MX MENU EDITOR, but, again I prefer a simple text editor to add/change/delete.

Trying out Lubuntu 19.04

This isn't a full review of the distro, just a quick walk-through of a distro I was using  over a few years.  I moved off to AntiX last year as I wanted to cut back  the number of distros I was running at home to make it easier for me to manage my home network.  Lubuntu was OK, but, I was looking for a lighter and faster distro for my eight year old netbook and AntiX worked quite well.

With the latest one I wanted to see what it looked like and how it worked.  The installation went quite well using VirtualBox.  I tweaked the setup a  bit.  I changed from 1 gig to 4 gigs of memory (the netbook has two), 2 CPUs (matching the netbook) and the default screen from 800x600 (netbook) to 1360x768 (making it readable on my WIN10 machine).

The initial profile works quite well and is responsive on the machine as set up.  It feels snappy and doesn't use a lot of system resources. 

As you can see above in a shell and Htop it doesn't use a lot of memory when it starts up and I am fairly sure I can tweak the startup to use less by turning off processes I don't want or need.

One of the first tweaks I made is to change the double-click mouse to single-click.  I have been using that for years and that is what I am comfortable with.

Using the Muon package manager was quite easy and is close enough to working like Synaptic that I didn't notice a big difference.  The only difference is when you search.  In Synaptic you type in the word(s) and press [SEARCH] and in Muon it searches as you type.

I did a 'Check for Updates' after install and installed the few updated packages that were there.  The process was quick even in the VM and while it was doing that I launched Firefox and tweaked the settings there while the system updated.  The one package I hoped was there is PaleMoon.  I use that to play Runescape Old School on my other Linux boxes as it still supports the Java Plugin and Firefox doesn't.  Palemoon does have a Linux download option and that is something I need to explore later on and the JRE.  For that I will look at the netbook for the packages I have installed and mirror that setup in the VM.

My next step is to burn a USB stick with the distro and see how it launches and runs on the netbook and my main Linux box.  If that looks good I may convert the old media box from Vista (shudder) to Linux and the wife's laptop also.  AntiX is good, but, so far Lubuntu looks pretty good too.

Overall if you have an older machine this may be a distro to check out if you don't want to go to AntiX..