Gilles Gravier's Weblog

Gilles Gravier's rants about things in general... security, open source, privacy, java, music... in particular.


« Oh my gosh! Java is... | Main | Why high definition... »
Wednesday Apr 30, 2008

OpenJDK 6 in Ubuntu Hardy!

 

So yesterday I had a very nice surprise. I moved my old home server from NetBSD (had been running that OS faithfully for the past 7 years - through a few hardware updates - but I've been bitten too many times by pkgsrc updates that broke most of GNOME and required heavy sessions of recompiling individual stuff to fix for my own comfort) to Ubuntu Hardy (I've been using Ubuntu on other laptops for quite some time, since version 6.04).

 

Basically, I first copied the 550GB of data from the 750GB disk of the NetBSD machine (since Ubuntu can't read the NetBSD filesystem natively) through the network to a new 750GB disk plugged into a Ubuntu machine... That took over 24H... Yech. Then I installed Ubuntu on a 200GB SATA disk and the new 750 GB disk in the small server that had previously been running NetBSD.

 

My first two steps were installing SqueezeCenter (for my Logitech Squeezeboxen music streamers) and SwissCenter (for my Pinnacle Systems ShowCenter 200 media streamer) which required some fiddling around because of Hardy's new AppArmor security scheme which messed up PHPMySQL... and Apache 2 who is new to me (the old NetBSD machine was running Apache 1.3)... I now have multimedia again at home. accessing

 

Then I prepared the P2P downloading stuff... aMule and Azureus... And that's where the cool thing happened. First, Azureus is directly in the Ubuntu repositories... which is nice. Second, when I installed Azureus, it naturally added the dependencies, which, to my big surprise, include... OpenJDK 6! Very nicely done! Completely transparent.

 

(As a note to Azureus authors : Because Azureus uses Eclipse's binary SWT for GUI, it is
not platform independent - which is stupid as it breaks one of the main
interests of using Java... so it wasn't available on NetBSD... which
is why I got used to using the excellent (and lightweight) Transmission BitTorrent GTK+ client. And as such, I guess I will, finally, stick with Transmission also on Ubuntu...)

 

So automatically, now, on Ubuntu, when needed, OpenJDK 6 gets installed... I'm curious to see how the updates will take place through the Ubuntu update manager. And with what delay compared to the official updates to JDK 6 from Sun. But this is very very good news for the Ubuntu users community, and for the Java world in general. From now on, one can assume that the official JDK will be available in Linux... transparently... just like that, when needed.

 

Java. There, for you, when, and where you need it!

 

My next steps include getting Apache 2 fully working with all the relevant virtual domains that I used to host... and also getting the SAMBA file server up and running for the family users on the home LAN. A few more nights of hacking fun in perspective and I'm all set!

 

Again... thanks Sun and Ubuntu for having made OpenJDK 6 directly available, no hassle, in Ubuntu Linux (and others, as I understand)! A beginning of a new era... Microsoft won't ship Java by default in Windows... fine. Linux will. Guess who wins? :)


Posted at 03:26PM Apr 30, 2008 by gravax in Opensource  |  Comments[8]

Comments:

Hello there !

I'm using Ubuntu Hardy on an IBM ThinkPad R50e.

As I have a ShowCenter 200, I wanted it to work with Ubuntu. So I installed SwissCenter, and when I use Firefox on my computer to check that the SwissCenter is working, it works a treat, no problem at all !

However, when I try to use the ShowCenter, it doesn't seem to find the SwissCenter !

Have you come across this problem? How did you solve it?

I'm browsing the net to find answers, but it isn't easy to find much about this machine, except that there are so many people having trouble with it!

Thank you so much for reading me.

Posted by Fep on August 07, 2008 at 02:58 PM CEST #

Come to think of it, I don't think that the SC200 has ever worked easily for me.

With XP, it worked when using the ethernet to connect it to the computer, but not when using the WiFi connection.

And, obviously, Pinnacle support is not helping.

Did you know that it doesn't work properly with Vista ?

Posted by Fep on August 07, 2008 at 03:02 PM CEST #

Hi!

Did you put the SwissCenter on port 8080? You will need to tell the IP address (X.X.X.X - I use 10.10.10.10) and the port (8080) to the ShowCenter in the main screen where you define your network parameters.

Also you want to make sure you have the latest firmware... Pinnacle now allows for USB drive updates. So you download the firmware file, put it on a USB, and follow the instructions. Later firmware fix networking (including WiFi stability) problems.

Gilles.

Posted by Gilles Gravier on August 07, 2008 at 03:09 PM CEST #

Thanks, Gilles, I've downloaded the new firmware.

I tried to run the SC200 with XP and the new firmware, it worked perfectly well.

How do you choose the IP address ? Is it somewhere in Swisscenter ?

Thank you so much, I'm going to try again.

P.S. : Are you French ? I am.

Posted by Fep on August 12, 2008 at 08:09 PM CEST #

Hello, this is Fep again.

I had a look at SwissCenter via Firefox.

This IP address that I have to give to the SC200, is it the same as that of the main menu of the SwissCenter?

Thank you again for your kind help.

Posted by Fep on August 12, 2008 at 08:20 PM CEST #

The last news about my SC200 and Hardy:

I added a server, that I called "SwissCenter", in the IP field I put in : "127.0.0.1:8080".

But it appears that my server is not available, whereas when I use XP and the Pinnacle software, it works perfectly well.

Do you think I typed the IP wrong? Should I put "http://" as well?

It seems I just don't get it. The SwissCenter works fine when I connect to it via Firefox, and the SC200 works well with XP. I don't know where the trouble comes from.

Posted by Fep on August 12, 2008 at 08:36 PM CEST #

Hi!
It's normal that it doesn't work. 127.0.0.1 is LOCALHOST. When you enter that IP in the ShowCenter, you are telling it that it is also the server itself, which, of course, is NOT the case. 127.0.0.1 is also LOCALHOST on your SwissCenter... but that address doesn't route to other machines on the network.

You need to give it the real IP address of your SwissCenter (the Hardy) machine on your LAN. Which I am going to guess is 192.168.0.X (I could be wrong). Port is indeed very likely to be 8080.

Gilles

Posted by Gilles Gravier on August 13, 2008 at 10:40 AM CEST #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed

Today's Page Hits: 191