State of Minion - Linux
 

Considering everything is being written in Java should be easy to have everything work cross-platform. Well easier then native binaries....

Are there currently Linux users in the alpha user base? I am curious how things are currently running under Linux as I haven't seen any forum posts on it.

I know I read it somewhere in here and of course can't find a link to it at the moment. It's been said before that Yes, they do have Alpha testers on all the platforms that they are releasing this for.

Yes there are kronarq, but it's a perfectly understandable question for you to ask. :)

Out of curiosity... How are the ads being displayed? I know Curse went with the god awful embedded IE approach which means I have to have IE6 installed in Wine now. Are there libraries for displaying web content built into Java or did you guys have to write one?

I am using a tool which works with the Eclipse Standard Widgets Toolkit (SWT) to identify and embed a browser specific to your system.

It has its kinks, but it works. Mostly I think the kinks are due to the fact that the SWT version I'm using is development (because the stable branch does not have these features) and they are being ironed out by the minute, literally. Currently I'm not aware of any issues except on Mac OS (which I have a workaround for).

That's an interesting implementation.

so there wont be a windows installer?

I'm expecting an installable jar file which you can run on all OS with a installed Java VM, so there is an installer eaven for windows :P.

Don't need it. Windows comes with a zip extractor "out of the box".

Actually, because it's a rather complex program, we're looking for a real installer. There's a lot of files that need to be placed in the correct place and I don't want to have to make you guys worry about that.

It will probably be a Java Web Start (JWS) installer. For those of you without JWS support there will be an alternative option where you can just download the packages manually and install (such as from a ZIP file or something -- not sure yet), but the JWS version should work for 99% of you out there. JWS has been supported since 1.4 I believe, and you will need Java 5 to be able to run this application.