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* Posts by Andrew John Hughes

2 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2008

Java and Linux - an open marriage in search of success

Andrew John Hughes

IcedTea

@Phil:

You seem to have a lot of inaccurate misconceptions about IcedTea, the variant of OpenJDK packaged in distros like Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. It has never included the whole of GNU Classpath as you seem to imply. A number of files were initially taken from GNU Classpath to provide implementations of classes not provided by OpenJDK. With the binary plugs, OpenJDK had all the same issues as the Sun JDK. Suggesting that the code should have been reimplemented from scratch is just absurd; when existing Free Software would do the job straight away, what is the point of that? All that would have done was slow the process of getting OpenJDK into distros. As more code was Freed by Sun, these classes were removed and the code base changed from an early version of what Sun calls 1.7 to a backport aiming at compliance with 1.6. The build of IcedTea in Fedora 9 later succeeded in passing the 1.6 TCK (http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/06/24/openjdk-and-the-icedtea-project/).

If you want to go to great effort to avoid IcedTea for no sane reason, then go ahead. But you're missing out on additional features such as a 64-bit plugin, support for more architectures and a PulseAudio plugin along with the knowledge that you're actually helping to support the FOSS community.

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OpenSolaris still has some Linux copying to do

Andrew John Hughes
Stop

Taking On The Wrong Market

Why is Sun Studio not packaged? Because it's still proprietary. SXDE is littered with proprietary packages like this, Flash and RealPlayer. I hope OS 2005.08 has ditched this for GCC as it's the right way to go. A better supported and Free compiler will allow them to build more packages.

I like to comment on OS 2005.08 itself, but I tried the Developer Preview and couldn't even get it to pick up the network card. It's a long way off current GNU/Linux desktops and Sun are aiming at the wrong market by offering this as an Ubuntu replacement.

They should push it first to those who'd appreciate a well-designed kernel with new innovative features rather than the monolithic blob that is Linux. But the higher-level apps aren't ported well enough to support the level of experience common with an Ubuntu user.

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