Paul wrote about “Fedora 10 around the corner!” and said something really nice:
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank you, the reader, if I haven’t already. You’re part of our community too, and without you we would be diminished. Free software isn’t just about bits and bytes, it’s about people, about [...]
This post by Kirill Grouchnikov from Pushing Pixels made me sad:
Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy
Are we really doing that badly? Ever since the full GPL release by Sun of the reference implementation of Java as OpenJDK and the positive wave that IcedTea brought to unite the existing libre java communities pushing [...]
There is always a lot going on in the low levels of the GNU Toolchain (gcc, binutils, gdb, etc) but since it is so low level and sometimes a bit specialised it is hard to keep up. Luckily Nick Clifton started a blog writing a monthly GNU Toolchain Update. This month saw lots of [...]
We bought an Acer Aspire One A150 Ab, which comes with Linpus, a stripped down Fedora GNU/Linux distro. It also came with a nice printed GPL in the box explaining what it meant and various offers for the source code. The stripped down Fedora is somewhat limited, so we might upgrade it to a full [...]
Benjamin Mako Hill, who is now on the board of the FSF, has a really great site Revealing Errors that has as goal to reveal errors that reveal the technology around us to learn how technology affects our lives. Wish I had seen this site earlier. As he explains it is a great way to [...]
Finally upgraded my main workstation from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. If you are lazy like me then you might want to do it through Fedora PreUpgrade:
$ yum install preupgrade
$ preupgrade
Very nice and completely painless!
It also offers an easy way to go from Fedora 9 to Rawhide (the development branch).
From the “Freedom Fry” press release:
The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.
“Yum, chocolately good! The tastiest operating system in [...]
So what is the first thing you try out on your little bare arm board when you get IcedTea, Cacao and gcjwebplugin working? You try to play slime volleyball of course!
Read all about it on Xerxes Rånby’s blog.
Just saw A Lazy Developer Approach: Building a JVM with Third Party Software by Nicolas Geoffray, Gael Thomas, Charles Clement and Bertil Folliot. They show something I always found super cool about the community around GNU Classpath and the free software community in general. Working together on parts of free software to enable everybody [...]
Things that make you smile:
From: Matthias Klose
To: debian-68k@lists.debian.org
Subject: building openjdk-6 for m68k
the openjdk-6 6b11-4 should build on m68k. It may take a few weeks, but I currently don’t see any issue with it. If you do so, please keep the build tree, so that the testsuite can be run, after the build finishes (taking some [...]
You would hope that Sun would get it by now, but apparently not :{
From the new JavaFX license:
“Licensee is not authorized to modify, make derivative works of, disclose, distribute, reverse engineer or disassemble the Technology, decompile binary portions of the Technology, or otherwise attempt to derive source code from such portions, or transfer the Technology [...]
Andrew Haley and Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote a really nice article for Red Hat Magazine called Open source project: OpenJDK detailing our libre java journey from the perspective of Fedora and Red Hat. From Sun’s first announcement, GNU Classpath & GCJ, bootstrapping IcedTea, gcjwebplugin, webstart, PPC and the zero port, OpenJDK6, to being (almost) Java SE [...]
When you upgrade to Fedora 9, make sure you get the zero-day update of icedtea/openjdk that Lillian made. It includes some sound fixes, Gervill midi support, the hat tool and fixes for javaws/netx. Then try out Jake2 (GPLed Quake engine in Java using Jogl and Joal). Just click that Jake2 webstart link, it will just [...]
German court tells Skype to obey the GPL:
“If a publisher wants to publish a book of an author that wants his book only to be published in a green envelope, then that might seem odd to you, but still you will have to do it as long as you want to publish the book and [...]
An EPEL update brought a nice surprise. The Fedora 9 IcedTea/OpenJDK packages rebuild for RHEL and CentOS on i386, ppc and x86_64. So if you are running RHEL or CentOS on your servers you can now:
$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
$ yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-{devel,plugin,demo,javadoc,src}
Rugged PDA available with JamVM and GNU Classpath
The Nomad maintains compliance with the MIL-STD-810F standard for drops, vibration, and temperature extremes, says SDG, and is IP67 rated for imperviousness to water and dust. It can withstand 30 minutes exposure under a meter of water, says SDG, as well as survive temperatures ranging from -22 to [...]
LWN published their index of all guest articles.
Since I was asked a couple of times to write about our libre-java efforts there are a couple of mine included:
GCJ – past, present, and future (April 6, 2005)
The GNU Classpath distro DevJam – Europe (September 28, 2005)
A look at GCJ 4.1 (February 8, 2006)
Toward a free Java [...]
I moved houses, but not my whole network setup, so I needed a little router to connect all the machines I already moved. Walking into the store the first router box that I saw had a big GPL-Inside sticker on it! How have times changed. Apparently having the three letters G-P-L on your (hardware) box [...]
Merging communities, so hard, and so much fun. We exchanged an “ambassador” and Mark Reinhold started an interplanetary exchange of species. Lets import some fresh blood on this little Planet Classpath of ours. Hi David, Hi Mark, Hi Joe, Hi Kelly, Hi Rich!
Been playing with the Fedora 9 Preview release on my laptop this weekend. It feels pretty snappy and the integration of the various new components is pretty smooth. I didn’t find any personal show stoppers. So I will definitely upgrade my main machine as soon as the final release is out (currently scheduled for May [...]
It is that time of year again! All libre java projects and hackers come together to celebrate, plan, hack and discuss.
There is a Free Java devroom and a list of people and activities. See you there!
With IcedTea installed, which includes gcjwebplugin, I was browsing a little and suddenly hit a streaming ogg/theora video that used the Cortado applet. And it just worked! Including sound support! So install the latest IcedTea and Try It Out!.
A full GPLed streaming video and audio stack. How wonderful!
var fsf_widget_text = “Help protect your freedom!”;
var fsf_widget_d_btn = “Donate”;
var fsf_widget_share = “Share this widget.”;
var fsf_widget_size = “normal”;
var fsf_associate_id = “6″; // already a member? change this to your own associate ID and refer people – earn gifts from the FSF, see www.fsf.org/associate/referral
Join the FSF as an Associate Member! Click that link! I need only [...]
There is a nice interview with Thomas Fitzsimmons about Fedora and IcedTea.
LWN published my article about Piecing together free java.