I recently scored a Toshiba laptop with Win 10 for a pretty good price, and so naturally the first thing I did was get the Windows partition to scooch over and make room for a Win/Ubuntu dual-boot system. A big ordeal, but it worked. Yay!
I installed Ubuntu Studio Version 20.04.3 LTS Focal Fossa (Xfce Desktop). Then I downloaded Rack 1.1.6 from VCV Rack - The Eurorack Simulator , unzipped it, and it seems to run okay, at least so far with a few âhello worldâ patches. Again, Yay!
However ⊠Rack does not appear anywhere in the âWhisker Menuâ of apps; in order to launch it I have to drill down through â/home/john/Rack/â (if I remembered where I put it, and not to be confused with "/home/john/.Rack/ "); and when I do find it, it just has a generic âgearâ icon, even though a proper C-with-a-dot icon png is sitting there in â/home/john/Rack/res/â .
I also cannot create a link to it to put on the desktop because double-clicking on that link only gives me that familiar error message: âRackâs resource directory â./resâ does not exist. Make sure Rack is correctly installed and launched.â. (I get the same thing on another system with Ubuntu Mate v. 18-dot-something.)
Is there a better way to install it and have it be more easily accessible like all the other apps?
The installation part of the VCV Rack manual simply says âInstalling on Linux â Unzip the zip fileâ.
As it turns out, I downloaded that already. It does do almost all of what I had in mind. I find it odd that it showed up in the original menu as âMenu Editorâ, but when it runs it calls itself âMenuLibreâ. I managed to get Rack included in the menu. Points for that.
The original Whisker Menu was all nicely sorted into different categories of apps, but now most of them got dumped into a single âMultimediaâ category. Itâs gonna take me forever to sort them all out again, especially since I donât have a clue what most of them do yet. They have whimsically non-descriptive names. AND you cannot simply drag one or more names into a different category. You have to select one and keep pecking at the down or up arrow (in MenuLibre) to shift each one past dozens of other app names.
It doesnât look like I can easily undo it to get a screenshot of the original hierarchy. Ah well.
[later] PS.I was able to use MenuLibre to correct its own name in the menu.
Yi use to make an script to run the rack, and I run the script with a launcher in the menu (also the script launch jack first, then rack) and I added the VCV rack icon to the launcher , voila!
Yup. It worked.
Now I can run it from the desktop or the Whisker Menu, and it has a proper icon.
(As does âLinux Show Playerâ, which lacked one before.)
[edit Nov. 15] And with some effort, I managed to create a separate one for Rack 2. Yay.
Part of the difficulty was from not actually completing the creation of the desktop file in nano. When I used CTRL-X and Y to save it, it didnât quite finish and only saved it as âVCV2.desktop.saveâ (or something like that). Eventually I spotted the line where you have to hit the ENTER key, at which point it renames the file. ]
AND you cannot simply drag one or more names into a different category. You have to select one and keep pecking at the down or up arrow (in MenuLibre) to shift each one past dozens of other app names.
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