ActivInspire and Linux

At school we have a number of ActivInspire Boards installed, and when they were “new” we had Windows XP machines running them. Now they are run on staff laptops running Windows 7, but I wanted to get them running on Linux.

From an older blog, I found some instructions:

Firstly, install the libjpeg62 library:
sudo apt-get install libjpeg62

(Edit: as I’m running 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04, I had to install the libjpeg62:i386 package instead ...)

Next, add the following into the ‘Other Sources’ in the Software Centre:
deb http://activsoftware.co.uk/linux/repos/ubuntu trusty oss non-oss

Now add the Promethean key:
wget http://www.activsoftware.co.uk/linux/repos/Promethean.asc && sudo apt-key add Promethean.asc

I found that I had to install ia32-libs, as ActivInspire requires it (even though it is a deprecated library ... sigh). I followed these instructions:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d 

sudo echo "deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring main restricted universe multiverse" > ia32-libs-raring.list 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

sudo rm ia32-libs-raring.list

... and now I can finally install ActivInpire!

sudo apt-get install activinspire activtools activdriver

Easy ...