GNU Classpath 0.96 “Staying Alive!” and IcedTea 1.4 just got released. GNU Classpath is slowly turning into a bootstrapping platform for IcedTea/OpenJDK by providing the necessary free software plugs that are missing from Sun’s OpenJDK to provide various GNU/Linux distributions with the fully free GPLed IcedTea Java platform implementation that will be in the Fedora (Werewolf), Debian, and Ubuntu (Gutsy) releases.
I tried to get this going on Gentoo without much success. I’ll have to give it another go now that new versions have been released.
The other day I found for the first time in many years a irc java applet in a web….and gcj/classhpath loaded it just fine thanks to the gcjwebplugin package. Classpath is just amazing.
I grabbed an iso of Gobuntu and installed it a few days ago. Went to the usual java.sun.com, and was prompted to install either the Sun jre or IcedTea. I gave the free-software choice, and found that the National Weather Service storm radar java loop now works, and a game site I now use also runs java games quite well. Good on ’em!
iced tea = (%100 Sun Java – %2 encumbered code ) + ( %2 code form classpath and some other places ) + a different repository
IMO, iced tea is ok for now. But i believe Sun has entered last phase of changing the project structure and repository system for open jdk. Plus they already covered many of the encumbered code (with the help of community). once it is finished, i think iced tea will be more like a duplicated effort. if they continue doing it, i will see it more of a publicity effort for RedHat than actual community contribution to Open JDK.
Understand that IceTea is a temporairy solution until OpenJDK is totally unencumbered of patented code. Given the circumstance (Acacia patent lawsuit agaisnt Red Hat), the Fedora community cannot afford to take a risk of lawsuit from another obscure patent troll.
Edited 2007-10-23 07:11
On Fedora it is easy to get. You just pull up a shell and type ‘yum install icedtea’ I use it with Limewire and it works okay.
The news talk about Debian. I couldn’t find IcedTea packages for Debian. Does someone know where i can find Debian packages? If possible for stable (Etch).
http://people.debian.org/~mkoch/java/
Debs are available here