John M. Gabriele posted a very nice overview of fedora core gcj package to the Fedora Core gcj mailinglist. It has a huge list of packages that are available out of the box now and explains the relationship between those packages and jpackage.org. The discussion on the mailinglist is very good. Nice to see a new community blossom.
European Parliament says no to software patents, yes to innovation. Thank you Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. Thank you economic-majority.com. And thanks to all those individuals that called, phoned, faxed and demonstrated these last couple of years. Hopefully this shows that european democracy can work. Even if it takes a lot of time and energy. The people from the FFII really did a good job, and I hope that they will continue to educate politicians in the future (hint: Donate to the FFII!)
And amazingly even Red Hat and Sun are friends when it comes to oposing software patents. They went as far as releasing a joint press release:
Sun and Red Hat, [...], set aside their competitive differences in this process. Both companies felt the interests of free and open source software merited cooperation at a high level.Seems Sun has learned a lesson or two. Now Lets see if they can put this new friendship into real actions in the future.
How you can help
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.
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
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.)
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.)
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 has been frozen and a GCC 4.0 RC1 is available. Please test and report bugs/regressions.
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
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
