Getting Ubuntu to recognize current manaplus

There are several The Mana World clients floating around. The Mana World web site links to a really old client in the downloads section. Many people switched to the 4144 client which until recently was located at http://tmw.cetki.com/mana/. Recently it's been updated and switched to http://mana.cetki.com/.

Linux users if you installed the old client 1.1.2.20 and go to install the new client you'll find both your Gnome menus and the command line link to the old manaplus client. But if we find the paths we get:

$ whereis manaplus
/usr/games/manaplus /usr/local/bin/manaplus


Both the command line and menus recognize the old manaplus because the /usr/local/bin/manaplus is part of the PATH statement:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games


The simplest way to change our Gnome menu is to click system then preferences then main menu and select the games tree then click on the manaplus icon and click the properties button. Chance the command from just manaplus to /usr/games/manaplus.

But this doesn't solve the real problem, which is the path for manaplus is looking to /usr/local/bin first. And why does it do this? Because it's before /usr/games in the $PATH list. In Ubuntu we can change this by editing the /etc/environment file at the PATH section:

sudo vi /etc/environment
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"


All we had to do is shift /usr/games from the end of the file to near the beginning. As long as it's before /usr/local/bin the newer version of manaplus will take. Note that if you do this you do not need to change your Gnome menu as per above.

The PATH doesn't take immediately. You need to log out of your xsession (but not reboot) and log back in for the PATH change to activate.