Fedora 7 Test 3 got released and includes the new gcj with 1.5 support. Really nice to see all this goodness work out of the box now.

Dalibor pointed out a nice story about GNU Classpath and JamVM being used to run Tomcat on the N800, and it all just works. Very impressive.

Phil Muldoon setup Planet Frysk. Cool!

Simon Phipps and Mark Reinhold made a video: Java Opens Up.

It was recorded before the Fosdem GNU Classpath/OpenJDK DevJam (check out some of the slides posted there for some more in depth info), so you probably won’t learn much more if you have been in Brussels. But they do a very good job of describing the process of going GPL (”The Gold Standard”), what is already there, when what will be available and the help they are looking for from the community. And it is worth watching so you can hear Simon call GNU Classpath “A piece of rebel code” :) There is an Ogg/Theora version of the video.

P.S. If you want to publish Ogg/Theora videos but only have something in a less open or encumbered format, then check out ffmpeg2theora. Providing video in a fully free open format will get you more viewers, especially if your target audience is the free software community.

Still recovering from the big Fosdem weekend. It was great and exhausting. I was super nervous about it. I just didn’t know whether people would mingle and talk because the group was bigger and more diverse than ever. But it seems that people did. A big thanks to David Delabassee for helping select restaurants and pubs to go to after the conference talks. People seemed to enjoy that a lot. And I was happy to see that the Sun/OpenJDK people also got something out of it. Both Tom Marble and Mark Reinhold have written about some of their experiences and the feedback they got. Petteri Räty already published his Gentoo talk on the DevJam Wiki. If you have slides, please add a link to them on the wiki.