The IcedTea project added a PowerPC Java port (both 32 and 64 bit) of OpenJDK. IcedTea 1.5 now also tracks the mercurial repo, provides better GNU/Linux integration by using standard system libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, giflib) and can be bootstrapped with the free gcj/ecj/classpath toolchain. OpenJDK just accepted a new porters group and Gary Benson wrote a guide to porting IcedTea that might be the start of a lot of other Java ports.
The more platforms it runs on, the the more people will run it. The more peple that run it, the better chance that bugs in closed source software as well as icedTea itself will be fixed.
I still haven’t had success building IcedTea on Gentoo but I keep trying. I think my issues are related to running in a hardened environment but I haven’t figured out what exactly is causing my build failures. With more people working on IcedTea now that it is ported I’m hoping these bugs will be resolved.
Try Fedora 8. Fedora 8 provide IcedTea.
Btw, Red Hat/Fedora has done most of the improvement in IcedTea.
But F8 does not offer IcedTea for ppc. Wait for F9 (or try RawHide).
I have a 64-bit Intel machine so I’m not worried about PPC. As for Fedora, I’m not ready to ditch my beloved Gentoo just for IcedTea although I am a former RedHat user.
This is so great. Kudos to RH.
It might be of interest to prospective linux users on the PPC architecture, that IBM offers a Java environment for Linux/PPC that works just as well as Sun’s one.
No browser plugin ships with it though, so my advice is to run Opera, that uses directly the JVM and not the plugin. This applies to Java on x86_64 too.
Nonetheless, it’s great to see this new technology come forward, along with the great improvements in Gnash and Swfdec, the linux/PPC desktop is starting to look like a good alternative for those iBook G3 orphaned by Leopard!
Perhaps this is the first step towards getting Java running on a PS3? The moment Java runs reasonably on a PS3 is the moment I go out and buy one immediately. I’m a big believer in playing board games as a family/group of friends but squabbling over rules, missing pieces, and lengthy dice rolls really bogs things down… but if I could just write the games myself then and we could play them on the big screen that would help a lot! This almost made me want to go learn C# and buy an XBox360… but through OSS I might not have to!
* Though I have thought about trying to see if I could just X11 the PS3 from a x86 box running Java.
The IBM JVM should run fine on a PS3.
This may be offtopic but speaking of Java, I’m running jdk7b24 and it’s a lot faster than jdk6 ever was.