You are here

Home

Freeplane hangs in Kubuntu 18.04

Submitted by Druss on Mon, 2019-03-11 17:58

Freeplane, a fork of the mind-mapping program, Freemind, works really well. Except for the fact that in my (K)Ubuntu installation, it sometimes hangs in the middle of editing a node. Once it becomes non-responsive, the only fix is to kill the process and restart the program. The version of Freeplane in Ubuntu 18.04 is 1.6.13. However, the current version (March 2019) of Freeplane is 1.7.7. So, it's highly possible that upgrading Freeplane to the latest version will fix this issue.

However, the latest version of Freeplane requires a newer version of Java. Ubuntu 18.04 supports only Java 10 in its repositories at the moment. Upgrading to Java 11 is necessary. All in all, fixing the Freeplane issue requires the following steps:

  1. First, check which version of Java you have installed on your machine using java --version It should show something like openjdk 10.0.2 2018-07-17. (We also want to upgrade to the OpenJDK rather than the Oracle version of Java.)
  2. Ubuntu offers a wrapper installation for OpenJDK 11 even though it currently only installs Java 10. Install this package using: sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk
  4. Recheck your Java version. It should still state that you're running Java 10.
  5. Now, we're going to install OpenJDK 11 from a PPA, an "unofficial" repository operated by the guys who maintain the openjdk package for Ubuntu. To do so, first add their repository to your system using: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
  6. Now run both sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade which should upgrade your version of Java to the latest version of OpenJDK11.
  7. Once this is completed, check your version of Java again. It should state something like openjdk 11.0.1 2018-10-16
  8. Now we need to upgrade Freeplane. To do this, download the DEB file named something along the lines of freeplane_1.7.7~upstream-1_all.deb from Sourceforge.
  9. Opening the deb file should bring up a package manager which will upgrade the package for you (after a notice about using the default version from the official repository).

That did it for me and the hangs have stopped for the moment. Hope this helps!

Tags: