Java under Linux

[roedy]

When Sun's Java runs under Linux, what distributions are best? What
screen controller schemes are best?

What are the best tools for development?

I am so infuriated with Vista I am thinking of setting up a dual W2K/
Linux system and gradually attempting to ween off MS.

 

[SadRed]

When Sun's Java runs under Linux, what distributions are best? What
screen controller schemes are best?

What are the best tools for development?

I am so infuriated with Vista I am thinking of setting up a dual W2K/
Linux system and gradually attempting to ween off MS.

Any major distribution would do. One thing
important is that, if the distribution has
pre-installed the GNU Java, you have to
uninstall it in order to use Sun's JDK
cleanly.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Any major distribution would do. One thing
important is that, if the distribution has
pre-installed the GNU Java, you have to
uninstall it in order to use Sun's JDK
cleanly.

With RedHat Fedora, to name but one, if you do a custom install you can
do a fine-grained pick'n mix of what you want to install - and one of
the options is to exclude GNU Java. I've installed it because it pulls
in Ant and Tomcat, but I also install Sun Java. I have no conflicts: my
PATH includes the Sun JDK binaries before the default binary locations
and CLASSPATH only references Sun jar files plus my custom extras, such
as JavaMail.

A suggestion for you: if you have an unused PC sitting round you should
consider putting Linux on it rather than building a dual boot box and
networking the two PCs. The result is a lot more flexible (i.e. you
never have to stop one OS to start the other) and anyway Linux is a much
better network OS than Windows and comes with heaps of free network
monitoring and diagnostic tools as part of the distro. If the PC is 800
MHz or better with 256 MB+ RAM and 30+ GB of hard disk it should be
easily capable of running a graphical desktop and is likely to provide
adequate performance with most workloads. As an example, I have an IBM
Netvista (866 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, 10/100 network card) that
supports:

- the Gnome desktop
- C, Sun Java development with a CVS repository
- Apache for my in-house reference web
- SSH / scp / sftp / ftp remote access
- SAMBA for Windows file and print sharing
- Postfix mail server, Leafnode news server, CUPS printer, NTP time
service, DNS service for my LAN
- backup services for itself and other systems on the LAN
- BOINC (SETI@Home and MalariaControl) to use up idle cycles

A JavaMail application I'm developing requires up to 400 MB of memory to
handle some large messages. It runs just fine on this system (only 256
MB RAM remember) though it does swap like hell if its handling the
larger messages.


HTH

 

[Lew]

Any major distribution would do. One thing
important is that, if the distribution has
pre-installed the GNU Java, you have to
uninstall it in order to use Sun's JDK
cleanly.

Which can mess up certain other software that demands GNU Java and none other.
Or so I concluded one time after trying to eliminate GNU Java. So I went to
the much more bothersome but so far successful /etc/alternatives mechanism to
get Javas to play nicely together.

Fedora Core 6 on an AMD-64 box.

 

[Sanjay]

When Sun's Java runs under Linux, what distributions are best? What
screen controller schemes are best?

What are the best tools for development?

I am so infuriated with Vista I am thinking of setting up a dual W2K/
Linux system and gradually attempting to ween off MS.

I have a Debian etch box with GNU Java and JDK 1.4 and java 5. It works
nice. But I have a separate system. If you just have one box, why not
use vmware and run linux on top of your vista. That way, no resizing
partitions etc.

Sanjay

 

[jt]

I have a Debian etch box with GNU Java and JDK 1.4 and java 5. It works
nice. But I have a separate system. If you just have one box, why not
use vmware and run linux on top of your vista. That way, no resizing
partitions etc.

Sanjay

I agree with Sanjay. I have an Ubuntu desktop and laptop running on my
wireless network and they work fine. I have the jdk1.6 installed. All
I had to do was set JAVA_HOME to that directory and make sure
$JAVA_HOME/bin was on my path.

 

[Ophidian]

When Sun's Java runs under Linux, what distributions are best? What
screen controller schemes are best?

What are the best tools for development?

I am so infuriated with Vista I am thinking of setting up a dual W2K/
Linux system and gradually attempting to ween off MS.

I run debian testing w/ kde, and do java development with NetBeans 5.5,
with no problems.

 

[Knute Johnson]

Any major distribution would do. One thing
important is that, if the distribution has
pre-installed the GNU Java, you have to
uninstall it in order to use Sun's JDK
cleanly.

You can use the JPackage compat rpms to get around those problems and it
works great.

I'm running Fedora 6, Sun JDK 1.6u1 and the JPackage rpms and have no
problems.