Rather than add another desktop launcher for release 1.6.5, I decided to see if I could code up some sort of menu that would launch whichever release I wanted to work with.
After trying several different menus (simple bash script, dialog, whiptail, and zenity), I decided on Zenity because it had the best looking dialog and didn’t run in a terminal window.
Desktop Launcher parmeters:
Name: Arduino IDE Menu
Command: /home//Arduino-Menu/Arduino-zenity (wherever you store the script)
Execute: Allow executing file as a program
See attachments for what the dialog looks like.
Simply select the required release and press ‘OK’ or double-click it.
Adding a new release is easy.
Once the release is downloaded and extracted, edit the shell script and add the release as a new line in ‘options’. Of course, this assumes that all releases are stored in the same directory (in my case, it’s /home//).
Hope this makes your life just a little bit easier – enjoy.
Script code (which I stored in /home//Arduino-Menu/Arduino-zenity)
#!/bin/bash
ardir="/home/<userid>" # Arduino directory
title="Arduino IDE"
prompt="Pick an release:"
options=(
"1.0.5"
"1.0.6"
"1.6.0"
"1.6.1"
"1.6.2"
"1.6.3"
"1.6.4"
"1.6.5-r5"
)
opt=$(zenity --title="$title" \
--text="$prompt" \
--list \
--column="Releases" "${options[@]}")
if [ -z "$opt" ]
then exit 0
fi
exec $ardir/arduino-$opt/arduino
