Scratch

Hello, all.

I found out that there was not a 64 bit version of Scratch in the Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu, or from the download page on the main site. I found the Scratch on Linux page (http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_on_Linux) and followed the suggestion to force installation of the 32 bit version. The installation failed; from the looks of it, it couldn't find the 32 bit versions of packages it's dependant upon.

So, I tried downloading the source code, installing the required dev packages, and compiling, which succeeded without error. However, I got confused with moving packages to the correct locations -- the README didn't mention the files in scratch/src had to be placed, for instance, and I had to work out where the .desktop, .xml, and icon files went.

At the end, I didn't get everything right; while scratch appeared in the Gnome application menus, with the friendly cat logo, it wouldn't actually launch. Executing scratch in an xterm, I saw that it was reporting a file not found error. All the files mentioned in the wrapper script were in the expected location, so I'm not sure what was wrong, though it could easily have been my mistake.

The upshot of this is that, from the looks of it, Scratch can readily be compiled for 64 bit Linux; it just lacks a good installation script, which someone more familiar than I am with the procedure for installing Gnome GUI applications could probably write easily.