1

Of the preinstalled programming tools on raspbian all of them work except for the java IDEs(bluej and greenfoot). I've scoured the internet but have found nothing. really need to code in java for a project on it. It says its loading for like a minute but stops loading and never actually opens it. No errors are shown and its a on a 2014 model A+ v 1.1 running raspbian. Any idea how I can fix this problem thanks.

Ikefun
  • 11
  • 2
  • 1
    Welcome. You are more likely to get help if you go into detail about exactly what happens, including the verbatim text of any error message. – goldilocks Dec 07 '19 at 15:25

2 Answers2

1

I'm not really sure current Java versions are supported on this older Pi-board. Just to make sure, open a terminal, and type "java -version" to make sure Java can run. You should get something like:

$ java -version
openjdk version "11.0.3" 2019-04-16
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 11.0.3+7-post-Raspbian-5)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 11.0.3+7-post-Raspbian-5, mixed mode)

If this is OK, you can install Visual Studio Code. VSC is a great tool for Java but is only available as 64bit version on the official site. But you can instal an earlier version of VSC which is 32-bit and compiled for the Pi. You can install in three easy steps:

$ cd /home/pi/
$ wget https://github.com/stevedesmond-ca/vscode-arm/releases/download/1.28.2/vscode-1.28.2.deb
$ sudo apt install ./vscode-1.28.2.deb

To work with Java in VSC, you need some extra extensions. Click on the "Extensions" button in the left bar. With the search box on top you can find extension in the Marketplace. "Language Support for Java" by RedHat is the most important one you should install.

Frank
  • 318
  • 1
  • 8
1

Run your IDE from command line, then you'll likely see the error messages besides just "Loading". Most likely it's a RAM issue, I have seen Java IDEs taking more than 1 GB of RAM when they load.

You can try enabling the swap file and increasing the swap size to a couple of GB, but if you run out of RAM on IDE loading, it is unlikely that you'll be able to work comfortably with it using swap.

Dmitry Grigoryev
  • 27,928
  • 6
  • 53
  • 144