I just finished installing Fedora 8, a Linux-based operating system based on Red Hat. One new feature that really caught my eye is that it includes an unencumbered version of Java, based on OpenJDk, called IcedTea. In addition to IcedTea, Fedora 8 includes a lot of Java software out of the box including Eclipse, Maven, ANT, Tomcat 5, and Jetty, among others. I took it for a spin to see what works and what doesn't. The biggest issues: IcedTea reports the Java version as 1.7, which confuses Glassfish (but not JBoss), and Netbeans wouldn't run either. (Eclipse had no issues.) Message was edited by: joeo@enigmastation.com

With the recent agreement with Sun, Redhat would better align project IcedTea with the OpenJDK project. Project IcedTea was created to provide Free Software alternatives for some of the proprietary solutions used in the OpenJDK project. So, this alignment may soon become available in Fedora too.

A Q&A is available on the RHT web site, referenced from my blog entry on that same topic: http://sacha.labourey.com/2007/11/09/qa-on-the-rht-signing-the-sun-contributor-agreement-sca/ Sacha Labourey JBoss, a division of Red Hat

I have just installed Fedora 8 as well, I upgraded from 7. I am glad to say it is a very solid and nice platform to development in. It was also a breeze to get going, by far the least amount of digging around in config files I have had to setup a distro 'my way'. The GUI controls are quite nice and polished. I prefer not to use yum for Eclipse nor my other Java tools/libs as I like to know exactly what is installed and when - my personal preference. Am I just being pedantic? As a developer, has anyone had any bad experiences letting yum take care of the Java tools?

I prefer not to use yum for Eclipse nor my other Java tools/libs as I like to know exactly what is installed and when - my personal preference. Am I just being pedantic? As a developer, has anyone had any bad experiences letting yum take care of the Java tools?

Me too, although I broke that rule and now have two billion java packages floating around, most of which I don't want, and the ones I do want don't work (but Eclipse and Netbeans are both fine, so I'm mostly ignoring the problem).

Does anybody know what is wrong with Tomcat 6 which isn't in the latest versions of Fedora and Ubuntu?

Does anybody know what is wrong with Tomcat 6 which isn't in the latest versions of Fedora and Ubuntu?

I have used tomcat 6 in Ubuntu. What error are you getting when you start tomcat? what version of ubuntu and jdk are you using?

let the JDK forking begin...

By the very definition of "joining forces", the intent is not to fork, but rather use the exact same core codebase and have various teams focus on specific aspects, such as OS-optimization.

Call it what you like, there is guaranteed to be incompatibilities which just increase development costs but I guess that will be solved by more "support" services. The problem with Linux packages for JAVA is that in most cases it is done the Linux way. I believe many of the coders are pretty smart but I wonder how many of the coders involved in creating the java packages have actually developed a real java application. That may explain why the RPMs are done as if made for a python or PHP application. Don't take my word alone. Just check the search link from the Tomcat list with regards to Linux/GNU/: http://marc.info/?l=tomcat-user&w=2&r=1&s=gnu+jdk&q=b

let the JDK forking begin...

It was already forked with GCJ and Harmony. I think now GCJ stuff will slowly merge into OpenJDK where appropriate. That's merging, not forking.