Slashdot Mirror

gholmer writes "The Blackdown project has finally released a production version of Java 1.4.1 for both ix86 and Sparc on Linux. This much-awaited release gives Linux users another choice for Java besides Sun's and IBM's."

Mike McTernan asks: "I am about to start programming my final year project for my degree. I am aiming to write a lightweight application that will communicate with the user through some (yet to be dreamt up) novel speech interface. The program is to support the idea of applets that can be loaded and unloaded on demand, and should be reasonably lightweight. The target OS will be Linux on an ARM based board. My initial considerations were to use Java, since Reflection allows easy opening of new class files at runtime, but Blackdown are only upto 1.1.8 on arm, and this doesn't allow WeakReferences that I would very much need to use for the unloading aspect. I thought about using gcj but this isn't upto Java 2 either. I then though about C, and it seems tempting and would give a much finer grained control over the application. In particular I think can do anything with dlopen() that reflection can do for me in Java."

"Am I correct in thinking that C is probably more protable than Java since I can get it to compile on any Linux system, most Unix variants (with tweaks) and probably on Windows with some hacks ;) I can only run Java on a few supported platforms (downloads for Java seem only to be Solaris SPARC|x86, Linux x86 & Windows). So, in summary, should I bother with using an outdated JDK on arm and limit my self to a select range of platforms, or just dig in and enjoy the freedom of C?"

If you're sick of relatives and need something a bit different to see, you need to visit The Standard Saab Moose Test. There is actually RealVideo of the test itself. This is just darn funny stuff. I'm glad to see Saab so committed to security *grin*. It comes to us from Glen Mccready's most excellent 0xdeadbeef mailing list that you should all subscribe too if you like to get a couple of funny things in your mail box each day.

Andrew Newton wrote in to tell us that The Java Activator is now available. Basically this little gem allows you to use a simple plugin to run the official Java VM instead of your browsers built in one. Theoretically this is more compatible. Looks pretty cool.

Rich Cannings wrote in to let us know that Steve Byrne has released the JDK 1.1.5 Linux port. Snag it over at Blackdown. They have libc5 and glibc versions as well as diffs.

Hey all you Pilot do-it-your-selfers... I just got a message from Deadbeef with a link to this page where you can read how to build a battery charger that sits built in to your Pilot's Docking Cradle! This is definately the coolest hardware nick nack I've seen in a long time. I'm really tempted to try to build it- despite my complete lack of understanding of anything related to engineering.