Batmass does not run under Ubuntu 18.04 with JDK 12

[fkromer]

I installed BatMass v0.3.1 under Ubuntu 18.04 with the install script batmass-linux.sh. I've installed JDK 12. When I start the application the BatMass logo is shown in the center of the screen. But the application does not start.

[chhh]

Batmass hasn't been updated to run with new versions of Java and there have been a lot of potentially breaking changes since Java 8. I should have included a JRE with BatMass installer originally, but I didn't know how to do it back then when it was released.

Now if you still want to run BatMass, there's a rather easy way without messing with your system's main java install.

There's a config file <batmass-install-dir>/etc/batmass.conf which has the following line in it commented out by default:

#jdkhome="/path/to/jdk"

Even though the name is jdkhome, it can actually point to a JRE. You can download A JDK or JRE version 8 for example from here: https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html. Don't download an installer, just a zip file. Unpack it anywhere and point jdkhome variable to it. On windows use double slashes in the path, like so:

# OpenJDK 8 - works
jdkhome="C:\\tmp\\OpenJDK8U-jre_x64_windows_hotspot_8u222b10\\jdk8u222-b10-jre"
# OpenJDK 10 - doesn't work
#jdkhome="C:\\tmp\\OpenJDK10U-jre_x64_windows_hotspot_10.0.2_13\\jdk-10.0.2+13-jre"