[CoLoCo] Having troubles with Alice....

[Richard Guenther]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get Alice (a java app that teaches programming concepts
written at Carnegie Melon University) to run correctly on Ubuntu.  My
eventual goal would be to have an Ubuntu lab set up in my classroom this
next year.  One of the last hurdles in convincing them that Ubuntu is all I
need is that Alice works correctly on Win XP, but not on Ubuntu--not quite.
First of all, here's where you can get Alice (You don't INSTALL it, you just
run it from it's folder--but it is large).

http://www.alice.org/

Here's the problem: on Ubuntu Alice looks wrong graphically.  All the
objects are there in form, but their color looks all low res.  I have looked
online for a solution to this and haven't found much.  Because Alice works
best in 16 bit color, I tried editing my xorg.conf to change that.  The
problem was there was no DefaultDepth listed on the xorg.conf.  I tried
adding it to 16, but then it had trouble booting--poping up a GUI asking me
to configure the screen correctly.  When that happened, I'd try to have it
detect by itself and it would then start up and Alice worked correctly--all
the graphics looked correct.  The only problem was that my xorg.conf was not
being used, as my touchpad settings all reverted back to defaults, etc.
I've gone back to the old xorg.conf settings and everything works great,
except Alice.

This is not the first computer running Ubuntu where I had this problem.  I'd
like to find a fix for this and post it on the Alice forums, as currently
there is nothing on there covering this issue (which I suspect is quite
common).  This is important because Alice is really a hot item lately (the
creator wrote that Last Lecture book which is #1 on the non-fiction charts
right now.  I suspect many teachers will be looking into using Alice with
their students.  If we could fix this one small error with Alice on Ubuntu
and post the solution, it would probably make a big difference in
encouraging Ubuntu usage.

Any ideas?  [I've attached the output of lshw and my current xorg.conf
file.]

Thanks,

Richard
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