File paths again
Jul. 11th, 2020 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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livredorHaving had real trouble installing the Gloomhaven app, I caved and asked cjwatson to help me.
It seems like part of the trouble was not understanding the idiom, which meant that having someone hold my hand was the right solution, because that's the kind of thing that's really hard to search for as you don't know what you don't know. And part of it was that there's a program called
So, idiom-wise: Linux doesn't have drive letters, and all the files everywhere, on the main hard disk or on detachable drives, live under
There isn't really a trivial way to move between GUI file explorer and command line. You can drag the breadcrumbs navigation into a terminal window, but apparently what people mostly do is look at the first few letters and use tab-complete. But obviously this is only going to work if you actually extract the files first, so that they have a file path. The GUI way to do this is to press the big green
The less general problems are: GH Helper gives you three files, acjwatson's. Once I'd worked out that I was supposed to run the
Onwards!
cjwatson to help me. It seems like part of the trouble was not understanding the idiom, which meant that having someone hold my hand was the right solution, because that's the kind of thing that's really hard to search for as you don't know what you don't know. And part of it was that there's a program called
Archive Manager which is useful for extracting compressed files, but it shows you a preview of the contents before it's actually extracted anything, which meant I was unwittingly trying to run commands on files which were still compressed. And some of it was just issues specific to the GH helper app, which meant that even when I was doing things right I was getting error messages.So, idiom-wise: Linux doesn't have drive letters, and all the files everywhere, on the main hard disk or on detachable drives, live under
/. When it has a name, the top level of the tree (or the root of the tree? tree metaphors are always spatially confusing and Linux is no exception) is called Home or Home(username). But that is for the benefit of the human looking at the GUI and you don't really want to use those as part of the file path. Also, the little picture of the house or folder icon isn't part of the path either; I was a bit confused about having pictures where I expected only text.There isn't really a trivial way to move between GUI file explorer and command line. You can drag the breadcrumbs navigation into a terminal window, but apparently what people mostly do is look at the first few letters and use tab-complete. But obviously this is only going to work if you actually extract the files first, so that they have a file path. The GUI way to do this is to press the big green
Extract button in Archive Manager; if you do that, you can specify the target directory and not end up with the files in a random place and never find them again. Archive Manager runs automatically if you click on a compressed file. The less general problems are: GH Helper gives you three files, a
.jar file which actually runs the app but is slightly buggy; a .exe file which works on Windows but they include it as part of the downloadable archive to be confusing, and a shell script called run.sh which... doesn't work, or at least doesn't work in my environment or cjwatson's. Once I'd worked out that I was supposed to run the .jar file using the provided command, and that I needed to uncompress it first, and how to actually specify the file path, it basically works, just it has some minor errors relating to sound handling expressed in a way I needed C to translate for me.Onwards!
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Date: 2020-07-13 02:43 am (UTC)The file system in Linux is different and takes getting used to, and it definitely wants to use tree metaphors for easiest understanding.
Getting things to run can also be an interesting affair when it's not done with the software installer, so congratulations on perseverance.