This article is part of Interactive whiteboard software testing series.

If ActivInspire was most sophisticated then Lynx 4 has the most exotic installation package. It mainly reminds me of the way things are done with Windows, as the software is distributed as a self-extracting binary file.

After downloading the package I executed it as superuser:

sudo ./Lynx-4.0-linux-installer.bin

This opened up a graphical installation utility which asked information about language, installation directory and approval for the software license.

After the installation I got an error message (in mixed finnish and english).

"Error: Error running chmod 777 ~/Desktop/Lynx.desktop : 
chmod: tiedostoa /home/opinsys/Desktop/Lynx.desktop ei voi käsitellä: 
Tiedostoa tai hakemistoa ei ole.

Basicly it is saying that chmod cannot change the rights of the file Lynx.desktop because it cannot be found. This then again is caused by the fact that in finnish the ~/Desktop -folder is called ~/Työpöytä. Because of all this the launcher icon created on the desktop doesn’t work no matter how hard you click on it. To fix this we changed the file rights.

sudo chown opinsys: Lynx.desktop

After this the program could be started by clicking the icon. In the first run program asks for information about the user and the software license (and the Wordwall code which is not even available for Linux?). Problem here was that the program should have been run again as superuser to be able to save the license information.

After basic installation the main problem is that the program is not executable. For a normal user it might be quite hard to understand all the errors or to fix the file rights. We’ll take a closer look at the software later and give more detailed comments. I have feeling that there will be difficulties with this one, but we’ll see that later.

-Antti Sokero