Installation Notes for Giocoso 3 on Ubuntu

Ubuntu is derived from Debian and can accordingly be expected to behave with Giocoso very well. I tested with Ubuntu version 22.04 LTS, 23.04 and the brand-new (at the time of writing!) 23.10, both of which ship with a heavily-modified Gnome desktop. I ran both as Live CDs and as installed on Proxmox virtual machines. Giocoso would not run on the Live CD version of 22.04, since the software prerequisites could not be installed; this was not true of the Live version of 23.10, on which Giocoso was happy to be installed, along with all its dependent software.

When doing a full install onto a virtual machine, the O/S installer offers the opportunity to download 'third party software for graphics' and/or 'support for additional media formats': I selected to install all 'extras' offered. I otherwise performed the default installation whenever prompted.

In all cases, the Giocoso installation was entirely without incident or surprises, and Giocoso ended up working reasonably well, including managing to display in-terminal graphics correctly (but see my final comments below).

Here's the 23.04 version:

And here's everything running nicely in 23.10:

The Giocoso installer creates a desktop launcher for Giocoso. It will start off greyed out and will need permissions to run, which are granted by right-clicking it and selecting 'Allow Launching' from the context menu. Once granted, the permission to launch is permanent, unless you explicitly revoke it. The desktop launcher is there for convenience only: the installer also creates an installer in the 'Activities' icon display thing (I'm sure the good folk at Canonical give it a proper name, but I don't particularly care to know what it is!), and you can right-click that and say 'Pin to Dash' to create a launcher in the side panel, if you prefer. The desktop launcher can then simply be deleted whenever it's convenient to do so.

I did notice that, for both 23.04 and 23.10 versions, when running in live mode, selecting Database Management -> Create a music database menu options produced some weird graphical glitches:

It may be difficult to see what I'm talking about in that screenshot, but I've tapped '1' to begin the create database process... and instead of seeing a nice graphical prompt for a database name, I'm seeing nothing at all except a green block over-writing some of the text for menu option 4. Actually, that's the text field where you type the database name, but it's strangely invisible. If you wait long enough, or start typing, the proper dialog screen appears, but it's unnerving otherwise. Similar graphical glitches occur at other times, too: for example, I noticed that when first launching Giocoso, the fine box lines around the program display at extreme left, right, top and bottom were not drawn... until I pressed a key to make the program switch to a new menu (for example, D for the Database Management menu). As soon as a key was pressed, the entire display appeared just fine. Technically, the program's functionality is fine -but it's hard to say that with a straight face when the user interface keeps messing about!

Happily, the full-blown installations (i.e., when not running from a Live ISO) did not suffer these graphical glitches.