Collanos broken with default Ubuntu Java

November 30, 2007

‘broken’ is a bit of a stretch, but not working 100%.  I posted this to the collanos forum with my workaround.

Searched for this topic but couldn’t find anything on it.

We’re trying to get collanos running in a mixed environment.  2 XP, 1 mac, 1 Mandriva and 2 Ubuntu (7.10).

The XP and Mandriva work fine.  Mac owner is out of town, but will try next week.

The ubuntu boxes both do not show any ‘object’ info beyond the word ‘file’.

Whereas in other platforms we see things like ‘file/application/msword’, the ubuntu versions only show the word ‘file’.  No MIME information is getting displayed (possibly stored, I don’t know) beyond “File”.  Adding a ‘.doc’ file from the ubuntu machine shows it as ‘file’ on that machine but it is shown as ‘file/application/msword’ on other machines.

This bug is preventing the ubuntu users from being able to launch anything from the workspace, which is a real drag.  It might be preventing other behaviour too - this is just the first thing I’ve been able to track down.

It looks like collanos is using its own distributed JRE.

If I change the Workplace.ini file’s VM paramter and point to the sun 1.6.0 JRE installed on the system, the bug seems to go away.  What’s odd is that this isn’t a problem with the collanos-supplied JRE on Mandriva, but only on ubuntu (well, those are the only two I tested).

So my /opt/CollanosWorkplace/Workplace.ini looks like

-nosplash
-clean
-vm
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/bin/java
-vmargs
-client
-Xms96m
-Xmx256m
…
more data here
…

instead of

-nosplash
-clean
-vm
/opt/CollanosWorkplace/jre/bin/java
-vmargs
-client
-Xms96m
-Xmx256m
…
more data here
…

I hope this helps someone else with the same problem and helps Collanos fix the bug or workaround it somehow. 

java still seems to be  ‘write once, debug on every possible vm’ 

Java is still going, but has seemingly fractured so much, it’s a brand now, not a technology.  Those fractures cause a lot of problems for developers and users alike.  We’ve seen it with the Mac - Apple not shipping a Java 6, and frustrating a lot of developers.  Why did Apple ever get in a position where they could decide Java’s fate on the Mac, instead of Sun?  Apparently Sun agreed to let Apple maintain the Mac version of Java, and Apple went about creating Apple-specific hooks for Java (I’m presuming these were primarily desktop and ui integration points, but I’ve never seen a comprehensive list of Apple’s Java changes). Why did Apple get a free pass to do this when MS got their head taken off for *basically* the same behaviour?  End result would be that I could right Java on Mac which would not behave the same on other platforms (or, likely, at all).

Many Linux distros ship the gcj/gij stuff from GNU as an ‘open’ replacement for a ‘commercial’ Java.  Whether the GNU project compiles to the name ‘java’ or whether the distro makers do it, this is certainly a misrepresentation and/or damaging to Sun’s Java efforts.  If on a Linux distro I see this:

$ java --version
java version "1.5.0"
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.2.1 (Ubuntu 4.2.1-5ubuntu5)

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I know that people will get a worse experience with ‘java’ than if they had the Sun java system (or any other java system that has had to pass all the compatibility tests).  Why does Sun let all these Linux distros (and perhaps GNU itself) dilute the Java brand so much?

Posted in Java, Microsoft, Software, linux, opensource