I am trying to run a free, graphically pleasing analysis tool called VOSviewer as a JRE. Info on it is at https://www.vosviewer.com/
It never gets going on my laptop, and I am not sure what to tweak to get it to work.
It is working great on my desktop.
Both are running KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu 18.04.
I have both Oracle java 12.0.2 and openjdk 11 runtime with Oracle 12 as the default.
I see the logo of each a short while when I try to start VOSviewer.jar but java silently fails.
I checked and see I have default-jre installed.

I looked into /etc/ for their components and found nothing obvious.
I tried to get a verbose account by using the command line to get java starting up in the terminal, but I am not expert enough to force it to access and run the .jar in the same directory.

Here's a recent attempt:

Code: Select all

jim@tabby6:~/Downloads/VOSviewer$ java -jar VOSviewer.jar
Error: Unable to access jarfile VOSviewer.jar
jim@tabby6:~/Downloads/VOSviewer$ ls
data  HISTORY.txt  LICENSE.txt  Manual_VOSviewer_1.6.11.pdf  VOSviewer.jar

I would appreciate your suggestions and alternatives.

Thanks to a helpful veteran on the Kubuntu forums I got what apparently works.

On the desktop advanced permissions are r-x for owner, group, others.
On the laptop for VOSviewer.jar advanced permissions I changed them to match by adding read for owner and it now works. Amazing, if that is what did the trick.
I am in business.

Now how do I change the control buttons readability for a high DPI screen... for both VOSviewer and Pajek which is running under wine, so one a .jar and the other Windows and apparently not under control of Plasma's System Settings? I guess that will be a Plasma question.

Still no progress on java scaling issue for VOSviewer.jar. It is a well known problem.
There's a modestly complicated Bash script I could try, but my preference would be for something simpler and more straightforward.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/526484/ ... dpi-screen

But the windows program for Pajek social network analysis, Pajek_5.07_AMD64.exe, running under wineHQ, has the benefit of winecfg which lets you use a slider to set the DPI. It works very well.

I am open to suggestions on the path to take with java scaling.

Scaling issues with VOSviewer should be reported to that application. It looks to me like it uses Swing for rendering using a default Swing look-and-feel. There is one available which uses GTK (2) for rendering, but I believe that would have to be provided in the application's jar and/or the application set up to support switching to a different look-and-feel for that to work. Regardless I'd be surprised if any Swing look-and-feel would be able to handle high-DPI settings (without the application being updated to handle the scaling).

Thanks, airdrik, for more on the issue.

I heard back from a co-developer of VOSviewer that they hope to have a fix before the end of the year.

I will live with it since I can figure out the buttons on the desktop and enjoy the high resolution of the laptop....