Older blog entries for mjw (starting at number 41)

STOP Software Patents in Europe!

How you can help

• Join the web demo
• Join the economic-majority.com
• Join the demonstration in Strasbourg

If you cannot attend the demonstation in Strasbourg in person please phone or fax your member of the European Parliament (MEP). Or better yet discuss the situation with others you work with and send a company FAX to show them how this new legislation will hurt your business if the Buzek-Rocard-Duff amendments are not adopted by parlement on Wednesday. If you don't inform your parliament, mega-corporations are doing the job for you: "The European Parliament is filled with lobbyists of Microsoft, Eicta, CompTIA and so on. There are 30 to 40 lobbyists permanently roaming the halls."

Join us now...

Jerry Haltom and Robert Schuster have (re)joined Planet Classpath. Make sure you read their announcements of the Ubuntu GCJ4 Eclipse packages and the GNU Classpath presentation at LinuxTag 2005 and the accompanying paper.

GNU Classpath/gcj presentations at LinuxTag

If you are near or in Germany please don't forget to go to LinuxTag this week (22 - 25 June, Karlsruhe).

On Saturday 25 June there will be 2 presentations on GNU Classpath/GCJ:

Robert Schuster - GNU Classpath (in German)

Andrew Haley - GCJ and Classpath: A Free Implementation of the java programming language (in English)

See also the full program on Saturday

Fedora Core 4 released!

One of the comments to the The Amazing Fedora Core 4! announcement was:

Sweet. OO.o 2.0 and Eclipse in an all-Free-Software distribution. Happy, happy, joy joy!

So go and try it out! (Or help test the Debian eclipse packages.)

Where is the Harmony?

Things like the bad competition between KDE and GNOME is what keeps me interested in the harmony project. There is also good competition between these projects. And I do hope Harmony can be what freedesktop.org is for the larger free software desktop community. That is what we have always tried to do with GNU Classpath.

And it seems that is kind of happening now. We have even seen Apache hackers contributing patches to Kaffe (showing that the licensing issue can be overcome!). And there is a lot of talk on the list on the cutting edge research that is being done against all the free runtimes (Robert surprized me by posting about an university course on hacking JamVM).

And even gadek and I seem to agree for a change. He points out Snap which tries to show that what Harmony set out to be is already possible. Creating a collection of free libraries, runtimes, compilers, tools and applications to show what the community around GNU Classpath has produced these last few years. Hopefully people wanting to make Harmony a success check out these kind of collections and try out Kaffe OpenVM or GCC 4.0 to see how we can have harmony asap! (BTW. The Live-CD idea is really nice. I wish there was one for FC4test3 to show all the native stuff created with GCJ for those that don't want to install a full FC4 test release.)

How to take the fun out of someones achievement

Uraeus post made me sad. It was an hectic week, but is seems our Harmony effort is already a success. planet.classpath.org saw a record number of visitors, the irc channel has been full of interested people and after some discussions back and forth it seems that everybody agrees that whatever happens next it will be a good thing for the whole community. I would love to meet my new harmony friends at ApacheCon Europe next month or meet some of the current GNU Classpath hackers at LinuxTag (during which cbj announced that I would be the new maintainer two years ago). But I decided instead to go to Guadec. I saved my last money to pay for the trip, stay and entrance fee (!). Just because I wanted to see all the cool presentations about Gnome using gcj, GNU Classpath, Eclipse and java-gnome. And to learn how to better integrate our AWT, Swing and Graphics libraries with gtk+, cairo, pango and the rest of the Gnome platform. But it seems that it is time to stop kidding ourselves that we will enhance the Gnome desktop with our efforts. Sigh.

GCC 4.0 RC1

GCC 4.0 has been frozen and a GCC 4.0 RC1 is available. Please test and report bugs/regressions.

planet.classpath.org back in the air

As soon as all the DNS servers have been updated planet.classpath.org should be back again for your reading pleasure. Sorry for the interruption. A mirror can be found at developer.classpath.org if you are impatient.

Sad to see Ranjit struggling with non-free proprietary software while there is so much Free Software available to help with what he is trying to accomplish.

GNU Classpath class documentation currently only comes in HTML. But is generated using gjdoc which can also generate texinfo or raw xml. From that you can generate info, docbook, pdf, etc. Evince is just the GNOME frontend for the new freedesktop Poppler pdf renderer used by both the GNOME and KDE hackers. It is under active development. Netx a free JNLP implementation that just works with GNU Classpath based execution engines:

/usr/local/gcc40/bin/gij -jar netx-0.5.jar -jnlp http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/Compare.jnlp

Escape the Java Trap!

The official program for Escape the Java Trap! is finally ready.

You are very welcome to join us and learn about the IKVM architecture and how to freely mix and match traditional java and .net applications and libraries, how GNU and Apache developers can and should work together, how you can do rapid GNOME desktop development through java-gnome, how researchers are using GNU Classpath to do cutting edge research into Just In Time compilation, see demonstrations of lightning fast native eclipse and jonas, learn what will be possible with GNU Classpath and GCC 4.0, whether Kaffe will ever release their version 1.1.5, what we think about compatibility, freedom vs control and learn how you can create your own GNU Compiler Collection frontend for languages such as the 1.5 java programming language.

Everybody is really excited about the event this year. A very big thanks to Fosdem for hosting us the weekend of 26 and 27 February in Brussels, Belgium. I think we have a very nice list of speakers. And there will be lots of very interesting announcements and demos. See the full program list and talk abstracts.

Please add your name to the list if you will be there.

Advogato

When advogato was down a couple of months ago I moved my diary to my own site. Which also hosts Planet Classpath. I should probably try to cross post my dairy on advogato since it is a nice community.

gcj

Saw that rbultje had some trouble with GNU gcj. It is always painful to see someones first steps with one of your projects be so hard. Especially since he hit a long standing usability bug. The solution to your problem was to do:

cd ..
gcj -o myapp application/*.java --main=application.Application

But that probably only makes sense if you know a little bit more about how gcj (and java in general) puts modules (packages) in directories, but uses dot (.) in source files or when indicating classes in a package on the command line.

Not being able to find the GTK+ AWT libraries is strange though. If you installed gcc yourself then you need to configure with --enable-java-awt=gtk, --enable-java-awt=xlib for the pure xlib version or, if you want both, --enable-java-awt=gtk,xlib. Normally distributions do already ship packages like this. If you are using Debian unstable then please note that the current libgcj5-awt package is broken in testing/sarge. This should be solved by the package in unstable that hopefully enters testing before the freeze.

Please send an email to the mailinglist if you have trouble with gcj. Or drop by on #gcj on irc.oftc.net. There are always people there that might be able to help and get you through your first steps in a couple of minutes. You don't have to spend hours struggling on your own.