Visual Studio Code on 17.10 Artful not instantiating

Greetings all!

I am a new Linux user, and am somewhat stumbling in the dark to learn my way around. My history is as a .Net (C#) developer for the Windows platform.

I have set up a LAMP stack to experiment with developing on Linux. I did not realize there was a Visual Studio release specific to the Linux OS, and was thrilled to see that. I am hoping to find a familiar interface that will speed my learning.

The basic hardware is a Dell Optiplex 790, 16 GB DDR3, Quad Core i7 @ 3.4GHz.

I have successfully installed UbuntuMate 17.10 Artful along with mySQL, PHP, and Apache. I also installed x2go Server (and client on my windows box) and am running headless with that. Finally, I installed Visual Studio Code using the GDebi Package Installer. It claims to have worked, and there is a new “Programming” entry in the Applications menu with “Visual Studio Code” underneath it.

Nonetheless, with each attempt to instantiate the app, it shows "Starting Visual Studio " on the bottom task bar, and after about five seconds that disappears and the application never loads.

At this point, the mouse still moves, but the entire screen becomes inactive. Nothing is clickable or responds to a mouse-over event. It’s basically a full-screen graphic and forces a reboot.

I don’t even know enough about Linux to know how to troubleshoot this. I’m completely open to the community’s wisdom and suggestions.

Thank you in advance!

  • damon

Hello, welcome to the community!

As your topic is more of a help request, I’ve re-categorised it for you to avoid confusion.

A neat thing with Linux is that it’s generally easy to find out why something stopped working. Try opening the Terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and type in Visual Studio Code’s command with the verbose argument:

code --verbose

This should be a handy starting point to research the error information when the “Starting Visual Studio” window disappears. :slight_smile:

Thanks Luke. I apologize for the miscategorization, and appreciate you moving the discussion here.

I suspect, over time, I’ll learn the quirks and tips for ferreting out these issues.

On that note, out of my frustration, I attached a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to the Linux box, and shazzam!! Whaddaya know but there were four or five instances of Visual Studio Code open.

So, it would seem that the application is indeed instantiating, but displaying only on the local desktop rather than the X2Go client.

Is there a configuration step I need to complete to force output to the X2Go Client?

At the moment, I have resolved this by punting the X2Go Service and installing x11vnc. I’m not as satisfied with this setup, but the driving factor is it works, whereas the preferred service would not display Visual Studio Code in the Client.

If there is something the community knows for certain that I could do to rectify this and get X2Go to work with Visual Studio Code, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks!!

1 Like

There looks like there may be an issue with vs code not displaying on the virtual desktop over x2go. There are a couple of github issues that outline the problem and a fix you can try is here: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3451#issuecomment-293017881

Thanks for the link greggerz! Having read through the various postings there, I feel a little better/less ignorant. I thought I was just doing something wrong. At this point, I think I’ll stick with my x11vnc solution since it is working. I like the responsiveness of X2Go, but it looks like, even with the proposed workarounds, the “fix” is intermittent. Some are getting good results while others are not. If I understood Linux better (total neophyte) I’d be more brave about experimenting. :wink:

Thanks again!

  • damon