I have noticed that the interface between ELAN and Praat differs between my Ubuntu machine and my Macbook Pro. On both systems, I am able to send audio from ELAN to Praat, but on the Linux machine, Praat needs to be already open. The Macbook will open Praat if it is not already, while on Ubuntu nothing happens.
I wonder if there is a preference setting missing on the Linux version to tell ELAN where/how to open praat.
In principle it should work the same on Linux as on macOS; ELAN tries to check if Praat is already running, if not, it tries to launch Praat and if that doesn’t work it prompts the user for the location of the Praat executable. In all parts of this process something can go wrong, possibly unnoticed. If you open a selection in Praat (from within ELAN) and Praat is not running and does not start, there might be error/information messages in the log of ELAN (View->View Log…).
In your home folder there should be a folder “.elan_data” and it might contain a file “praat.pfsx”. If so, you can open this file in an XML- or text editor and you can see where ELAN thinks the Praat executable is located. If you delete/(re)move this file, ELAN will (after the next launch) probably ask you to locate the Praat executable.
-Han