Investigate Cyrillic etc. paths (user report)

[jozik]

Reported on Repast-interest. Moving install location to non-Cyrillic path appears to solve this.

I just started with Repast and wanted to try it out. However, I ran into a problem that I cannot solve. I work in Pop OS 21.10 (Ubuntu 21.10-based), with GTK3 and OpenJDK 11.

Namely, I installed Eclipse Eclipse IDE for Eclipse Committers (includes Incubating components) 2021-06 (4.20.0), then installed Groovy Eclipse e4.20 and Repast. Removed Wild Web Developer and Web Developer project POM editor through Help -> About Eclipse IDE -> Installation details -> Uninstall ... Finally, I set Groovy compiler to 3.0.9 through Window -> Preferences -> Groovy -> Compiler.

Then, I went about importing the demo projects from the archive, by going File -> Import Repast Examples. They are imported just fine, but when I try to run the Zobies_Demo by going Run As -> Zombies_Demo model, it prints this message:

Zombies_Demo Model [Java Application] /usr/lib/jvm/java-11/openjdk-amd64/bin/java

Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS: -Xmx4096m -Xms512m
ERROR [main] 13:56:05,766 saf.core.runtime.Boot - null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at saf.core.runtime.Boot.init(Boot.java:79)
at saf.core.runtime.Boot.main(Boot.java:247)
at repast.simphony.runtime.RepastMain.main(RepastMain.java:43)
ERROR [main] 13:56:05,769 saf.core.runtime.Boot - null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at saf.core.runtime.Boot.run(Boot.java:101)
at saf.core.runtime.Boot.main(Boot.java:248)
at repast.simphony.runtime.RepastMain.main(RepastMain.java:43)

I searched this mailing list, and it appears that it might be an issue with /eclipse/plugins/repast.simphony.runtime_2.0.1/ and with boot.properties file, but there is such a file there. Its contents are:

# Comma separated list of folders with plug-ins
# (plug-in repositories)
pluginFolders = ../

# Plug-in life cycle handler implementation
org.java.plugin.standard.PluginLifecycleHandler = repast.simphony.plugin.PluginLifecycleHandler

# plugin file name
org.java.plugin.boot.pluginFileName = plugin_jpf.xml

# restriction to only load plugins with this tag and value
plugin.restrict.simphony = 2.9.0

Please help, I don't know even where to start with this, I'm new to all this. What can I do to remedy this?
Also, why don't you simply offer Eclipse already preset for Linux, as you do for Windows and Mac? It will save us beginners a lot of trouble setting everything up. For example, you can pack it as a flatpak/snap or even a virtual machine, like OpenModelica do.