Installing itemis CREATE on a Linux machine boils down to the following steps:
Congratulations, you have just installed and started itemis CREATE!
You can proceed now by installing a itemis CREATE license or by creating your first itemis CREATE project.
Depending on your Linux distribution and version, you might need to install additional packages for Webkit GTK from your distribution’s repository (or elsewhere). Below please find the necessary commands for some Linux distributions. To execute them, you have to have system administrator permissions. So please create a root command-line shell or use the sudo command, which is the typical procedure on Linux.
The list of Linux distributions mentioned below is in no way meant to be exhaustive. If your Linux distribution is not yet among them and you manage to find out the proper commands for it, please let us know!
On Linux, Eclipse uses the GTK library for drawing the user interface. Some users experience issues, especially when using the default version GTK3. If your installation of itemis CREATE does not perform as expected, is laggy, has drawing issues or looks weird, refer to Configuring itemis CREATE to use GTK2. If the welcome page looks broken and asks you to configure webkitgtk, refer to Webkit GTK.
GTK+ is one of two major graphics libraries used in the Linux world (the other one being Qt), and it is the one being used by the Eclipse project, on which itemis CREATE are based. There are two different versions of GTK+: The newest one is often referred to as “GTK3”, and the old one is named “GTK2” or just “GTK”.
Eclipse made the switch from GTK2 to GTK3 with the Mars release. While in general it looks and performs somewhat better, some users experience issues with it, especially concerning the performance or just drawing bugs, like wrong colors being used or widgets not displaying properly. If you experience anything like that, you should try to configure itemis CREATE to use GTK2, which is fairly easy to do.
You can use GTK2 instead of GTK3 on a case-by-case basis by having the environment variable or shell variable SWT_GTK3 set as shown below when starting itemis CREATE. On the command line, you would usually start the stand-alone itemis CREATE like this:
./SCT
This assumes your current directory is the tool’s installation folder.
To use GTK2, execute this command instead:
SWT_GTK3=0 ./SCT
It defines the SWT_GTK3 shell variable SWT_GTK3 with a value of 0 and passes it to the SCT process.
If you installed itemis CREATE into another Eclipse instance, the corresponding command to start that Eclipse instance is:
SWT_GTK3=0 ./eclipse
If you want to make your switch to GTK2 permanent without having to set the SWT_GTK3 variable each time, you can define that in the tool’s .ini file. In a stand-alone itemis CREATE installation, that’s the file SCT.ini in the yakindu-sct installation folder. If you installed itemis CREATE into an existing Eclipse installation instead, it’s the file eclipse.ini in that Eclipse instance’s installation directory.
Navigate to the yakindu-sct installation folder of your itemis CREATE instance or to the eclipse installation folder of your Eclipse instance, and open the file SCT.ini or eclipse.ini, respectively, with a plain-text editor of your choice.
Look for the “-vmargs” line. Right above this line, paste these two new lines:
--launcher.GTK_version
2
The result looks similar to this:
-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.4.0.v20161219-1356.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_64_1.1.550.v20170928-1359
--launcher.GTK_version
2
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.8
-Xms256m
-server
-XX:PermSize=256m
-XX:+UseParallelGC
-Xmx3G
Please note: Do not attempt to replace all of the contents of your SCT.ini file with the lines above! The specified version numbers have to match your installation, and if you change them, SCT will not be able to start anymore.
In order to double-check that itemis CREATE now uses GTK2, please proceed as follows:
On Linux, you might encounter certain user interface problems or display irregularities when working with Eclipse-based software, e.g., when viewing the welcome page. This is a general problem that can also affect itemis CREATE. It is due to Eclipse on Linux needing specific versions of the libwebkitgtk library to function properly. Depending on your Linux distribution and version, you already have a suitable libwebkitgtk library installed or not.
Commands for installing proper libwebkitgtk versions:
Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 LTS:
sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0.0
sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-3.0.0
Fedora 25 Workstation:
yum install webkitgtk
openSUSE Leap 42.2:
Works out of the box; nothing to be done.
Red Hat Workstation 7.3:
rpm -ihv /opt/software/webkitgtk-2.4.9-1.el7.x86_64.rpm