The beginning of Arduino project development always starts with blinking an LED. That is what every physical computer programmers learn and do to make sure that everything is correctly installed and is in good condition.
That is, unfortunately, not the case. Of me at least. I just got a brand new Arduino, tried to set it up… and found out that its IDE wouldn’t start! No! It wouldn’t show any window!
Alas, my very first Arduino project has eventually started with finding bugs that can possibly contribute to the problem with runnig the IDE.
I read a bunch of troubleshooting pages, github issues, Ubuntu — my OS — questions and even lines of the source code. But nothing worked.
I then gave up the downloaded, and unzipped binary file and, on second thoughts, tried to install the software using a commandline package manager.
The package manager successfully installed Arduino IDE (ver. 2.1.0.5+dfsg2-4) onto my Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS. It worked! As I typed “sudo Arduino” on the commandline, the IDE started working and showed a new sketch window.
That made me really confused, though.
I couldn’t figure out this whole situation with all these subtle clues. I thought it shouldn’t work fine either… and suddenly got a crazy idea; what would happen if I installed software written for different architectures, say i386 or ARM, onto my 64 bit AMD workstation.
I downloaded 3 variations of the latest IDE; Linux 32bits, 64bits and ARM. As I executed the install.sh files, they all added the desktop short cut! All of them looked perfectly fine!
But the two of them, of course, did not run no matter what. When you click the desktop icon, you get a message that there was an error launching the application or the program stops working without showing any message.
The other worked perfectly! There was actually no problem with the software. Maybe I made the most stupid mistake in this issue. Well, I screw things up from time to time. But, on the other hand, I guess this may be helpful for some of those who have encountered the same problem.
Getting Started with Arduino: The Open Source Electronics Prototyping Platform (Make)
