After so many “critical bugfix releases” that have plagued Java during the past year, it is nice to see some real hard work being made available to the public. The IcedTea developers have been preparing their first major release since 2.3.0 of August last year. Today, icedtea-2.4.0 was announced on the mailing list and on the blog of release manager Andrew John Hughes . The list of enhancements and new features is way too long to copy here, it’s best to go check out that blog post. There are a lot of bug fixes as expected, but there were no vulnerabilities that needed patching this time. A lot of effort has gone into the CACAO and JamVM alternative virtual machines for Java.
You will probably be surprised to see the jump in the update number for the OpenJDK package which is built using the new IcedTea. A finalized Update 40 of OpenJDK7 is scheduled for Augist this year, and some of the new features still have to be added to the source tree. But the IcedTea developers decided that making a new major release of their software available a few months earlier was for the better, considering the huge number of improvements and fixes that will result in a solid Java 7u40 release already.
On to the packages (and thanks Andrew for showing your appreciation for Slackware)!
My packages for OpenJDK have been compiled on Slackware 13.37 (and are useable on 13.37 as well as 14.0 and -current!). Get them preferably from a mirror site (faster downloads):
- http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , the primary location (bandwidth-capped)
- http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , my own fast US mirror
- http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , fast UK mirror, needs a day to get in sync
Further packages that are recommended/required:
- Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web (OpenJDK itself does not contain such a plugin).
- Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.
Note that you should only install one of the two packages, either openjdk or openjre, do not install both at the same time or things will break! The openjdk package contains the jre (java runtime) as well as the java development kit.
Eric
😀 Nice, i hope it don’t break my bank office page, they never goes up with the new releases. They often do after 2 weeks 🙁
PS: I found a misspelling on your text “A finalized Update 40 of OpenJDK7 is scheduled for Augist this year…” 🙁
I updated the package and now my eclipse’s not working saying no JRE or JDK is available to run eclipse, my bank thing is not working either, saying theres no java installed… what should I do ?
Hi Vitor.
I have Eclipse installed at home, so I can check tonight what happens if I start it.
What happens when you run “javac -version” or “java -version”?
Eric
It always makes me happy to see people picking up on our work and packaging it 🙂 It’s also nice for me to be able to get out something more interesting than a security update. Sadly, there’s another one on the horizon; expect 2.1.9, 2.2.9, 2.3.10 and 2.4.1 over the next few days.
Hi Andrew
Thanks for supporting the Slackware build by merely commenting here 😉
I was already wondering at potential security updates after the Oracle update and the recent commits in the icedtea repository.
Cheers, Eric