This week, in an online class I'm taking, I was asked to give the class a demonstration of an app I had just written. This was to be accomplished via Elluminate Live (which was recently acquired by Blackboard.com).
When I attempted to begin my presentation, I found that I was unable: under Tools->Application sharing, I only had one option ("stretch to fit") available. Two others, Request Desktop Control and Request Control of Shared Applications were present but greyed out. Normally, many more options should be available--the fact that they weren't made giving my demo impossible. I was left in a lurch and had to ask my professor to move on to the next presenter.
I knew there had to be a way to fix this, so I set about figuring one out. Fortunately, I found one. The issue turned out to be with Oracle JRE 7.
Here's what I did to get desktop application sharing working for Elluminate Live on Ubuntu 12.04:
- Install the Java 6 JRE. This is easier said than done at this point as Java 6 is near end-of-life and is unavailable from the Ubuntu or Ubuntu partner repos due to licensing issues. Instructions for installing it (legally) can be found here. I used the flexiondotorg github repository method.
- Set Java 6 as the default JRE (see Ubuntu help link in #1 above).
Now I won't have to resort to using a Windows VM to just to get into my class every week.
Note: OpenJDK might work, but I haven't tried it in a couple of years due to other issues I ran into with that JRE.
OpenJDK upsets Elluminate at startup, so generally not a winner. It is of course wrong and should work - if an app passes the java runtime tests, it should work on any runtime and any platform. In practice though, developers put all kinds of nonsense in that often not only makes it runtime specific, but also dependent on a particular operating system. Completely daft
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