Canonical To Remove Sun Java From Repositories, Users' Machines 307
New submitter an_orphan writes "Apparently, Oracle's 'Operating System Distributor License for Java' is expired, causing Ubuntu to not only remove sun-java from the partner repository, but from user's machines."
An the point is? (Score:5, Interesting)
To shoot oneself in the foot?! I just don't get it. Wouldn't Oracle want to have their platform deployed as widely as possible? Someone's asleep at the helm. Just like at the media companies. Seems some big corporations these days are like chicken running around headless...
Re:An the point is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An the point is? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry dude, I know of a highly secretive website where you can get the java warez. Are your ready for it?
OK, here it is: java.com [java.com]
Ta-dah! We'll show Oracle that they can't take their java away from us!
Re:An the point is? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just Java. You can get Oracle's flagship database products like that. You've always been able to. They've been pretty permissive like that for pretty much forever.
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I think they've more or less given up on Java as a desktop platform, and are focusing on a mixture of enterprise (all that J2EE and Java Beans stuff) and mobile (hence the Google lawsuit).
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Wouldn't Oracle want to have their platform deployed as widely as possible?
What Oracle wants is money, they don't care anything else. The new license forced Debian to stop distributing Oracle Java from the non-free repositories, I'm not surprised this happens to Canonical.
Re:An the point is? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's being replace by OpenJDK. It was planned to happen like this for years. This was planned obsolescence with a gradual move to OpenJDK. Their is no surprise here except for those who didn't know it was coming. The summary is inflammatory but if you read the article you see that this is nothing really.
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It's being replace by OpenJDK. It was planned to happen like this for years. This was planned obsolescence with a gradual move to OpenJDK. Their is no surprise here except for those who didn't know it was coming. The summary is inflammatory but if you read the article you see that this is nothing really.
Well the last time I tried OpenJDK with freenet it didn't work right. That was about a year ago. I wonder if that has been fixed. I guess I will find out.
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I have ten years' Solaris experience. Oracle buying Sun was when I took my boss and my boss's boss aside and strongly put the case that we needed to get the hell off Solaris immediately and go to Linux. (That I was advocating against my own CV was persuasive in itself.)
We commissioned a new box (12-core x86) to run a proprietary Java app; Linux versus Solaris would have made no difference; but Oracle charged another £300 for one year's Solaris licensing when CentOS was free. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HE
Bad summary! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad summary! (Score:5, Informative)
OpenJDK is still the default, and still distributed. And like TFA pointed out, the Sun/Oracle version is old and has security issues anyway.
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Remove the distro package, do the fiddling about to hand-install from the Oracle tarball for Sun Java 6 latest. We're doing something similar at work. (Well, I'll be handrolling a deb for internal maintainability, but I'll be starting with the Oracle tarball.)
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That sort of thing has plagued Java from day one. It's never been more than write once, run anywhere that has exactly the same JVM down to the sub-sub-minor version. That seems to be improving, but can't be said to be fixed entirely. Back when Sun was pushing Java on the desktop they had a lot of complaints internally about having to have 3 versions of Java installed to cover these issues.
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We got bitten at this at work between Sun Java 6 on Solaris SPARC versus Sun Java 6 on Linux x86. What the fuck.
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I use Java as little as possible, and still run into these kinds of problems. I run Arch Linux, which right now has an openjdk6 and a jdk7-openjdk package. There was a a package based on Sun's Java, but it seems to be gone. Really annoying to have to switch between packages to get various Java apps to run, or to find that none of them work.
This sort of thing is one reason I've stayed away from Java. It's general distrust of anything that could be proprietary, no matter how open it seems. It's not eve
OpenJDK (Score:5, Informative)
Sensationalist headline is sensationalist.
Ubuntu will still have the OpenJDK, which is maintained in part by Oracle. "Sun Java" refers to a specific JVM installation.
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You meant
"Ubuntu will still have the OpenJDK, which is not actually working for most stuff"
And alternatively users can download the JRE 7 from Oracle, which also does not work for a lot of stuff.
Great help that.
Java: Fails everywhere.
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Why is this flamebait? Its utterly accurate. I havent been able to deploy Java7 anywhere, mostly because i havent found more than 1 program (minecraft) which actually works with it.
Re:OpenJDK (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about them no longer supplying it, but actually ripping it out of your box. They've already distributed it, and under an appropriate license- it wasn't leased out and the license doesn't require removal once the license is retired.
It does not make any sense to do what Canonical's doing here. Not happy about that thinking.
And OpenJDK still not working (Score:4, Insightful)
All the while OpenJDK still doesn't work with half of the stuff out there, for example Juniper's SSL VPN.
Great! Java: Compile once, works nowhere.
Re:And OpenJDK still not working (Score:4, Informative)
doesn't work with crashplan, either
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Remember when they used to call C a portable programming language?
Remember when they used to call Java a portable programming language?
Bad news. (Score:2)
Let's hope they handle this well (aka a de updater that lets people know what and why it happens).
I am critical about ubuntu usually, and I can almost hear some bearded guy saying: "Told you so, next time learn to build upon Free Software instead". But I think this time they would have rather avoided this and they couldn't.
I dunno, the industry seems to be killing java and flash ahead of time.
SUN JAVA is not the only JAVA (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu uses OpenJDK Java by default. Users have for years had the option to switch out the default OpenJDK Java for an alternative package in the 3rd party repository which is Sun Java. That alternative is being removed. In fact, it has never been available in the latest Oneiric 11.10 release of ubuntu. In the latest release OpenJDK is the default & the only java available from the package repos.
Most people use OpenJDK on Ubuntu and for them this news means nothing.
If you're using an older release (11.04 or earlier) and you have sun-java installed, simply remove the package & install default-jdk. problem solved.
just replace your cars water pump (Score:4, Insightful)
with a different water pump. problem solved!!!
other than your car being out of commission for several days, and untold problems being encountered due to the incompatabilities between the old water pump and the new water pump. but whatever.
in the fantasy land of free software, you can replace word with openoffice, exchange with ????, and it wont cost anyone anything!
Re:just replace your cars water pump (Score:5, Insightful)
Continuing this stupid analogy: Your current water pump has security issues. Thieves can use it to steal your car! It has to be replaced, even if you're so incompetent that it takes you "several days" to get the job done.
Ubuntu no longer has access to OEM pumps, due to decisions made by the manufacturer. If Ubuntu's 3rd-party pump won't work for you, you can still go directly to the OEM, download the exact replacement pump and install it, for free.
Re:just replace your cars water pump (Score:5, Informative)
You're confused. OpenJDK is the OEM pump in Ubuntu. Sun java is the aftermarket optional part which isn't an available option on ubuntu cars anymore. (Though you can still do it yourself.)
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Sure, pull it off the shelves, but who gives them the right to come out to my house and pull off my existing water pump, leaving me stranded?
Don't be obtuse. You are the only one who decides whether automatic updates occur, and/or whether to pin a package to a particular version.
Re:just replace your cars water pump (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! You already replaced your car's stock water pump with some aftermarket thing, now that's not working out so well for you. So do the right thing and replace that aftermarket water pump with an OEM part like the car came with.
Re:just replace your cars water pump (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly! You already replaced your car's stock water pump with some aftermarket thing, now that's not working out so well for you. So do the right thing and replace that aftermarket water pump with an OEM part like the car came with.
That OEM water pump wouldn't pump the water that I need, that is why I installed the aftermarket pump which happens to support _all_ water. Now, so long as I only use some water that was tested with the OEM pump I'm fine, but if I need water that was only tested on the aftermarket pump (which most water is, because the aftermarket pump works on all cars, not just geeky cars) then now I'm screwed.
Why do they need a distribution license? (Score:2)
Why does Canonical even need a "Operating System Distributor License" for Java? Wasn't Java re-licensed as GPL v2 back in the Sun days? How can they stop anyone from distributing something under the GPL?
Re:Why do they need a distribution license? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenJDK is based on the open-sourced version of Java, and Canonical continues to distribute that (and it's the default on Ubuntu). What's being removed is the official Sun (now Oracle) Java packages. They used to include those as well, because there were some compatibility issues with OpenJDK and some apps (especially commercial apps).
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because this particular version that is being retired is not the GPL version. It is the yuccy non-free edition and being proprietary software you are using it at the whim of the copyright owner (Oracle) and not by the user. It is also buggy and insecure. It is being removed from users machines because it is buggy and insecure. If you want the GPL version that is safe to use long term and is actually in Ubuntu (rather than in the *canonical* partner repo) then use openJDK which is GPL licensed and you use it
Writing was on the wall (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo saw the license expiring, and did a proactive thing: flipped the "fetch restriction" flag back on, forcing users to pull it manually and slap it into the right place to install/upgrade.
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Gentoo is a bit unique in this regard. Gentoo tends to distribute source tarballs unmodified, and does any patching on the user's machine. That allows it to operate under more restrictive licenses. Then, if there is no license at all then we can use mirror or fetch restricting. The former prevents the file from being mirrored so that the user gets it straight from upstream. If upstream puts it behind some kind of click-to-agree page then it uses fetch restricting, which means the user is told where to
Oracle needs to be less stupid and less greedy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Second - What the hell are they going to replace it with? Are they saying you have to download and install Java manually? OpenJDK supposedly doesn't work with all things.
Third - What does this mean for Ubuntu derivatives like Mint? Are they going to have to pull the jdk as well?
Forth - Can we _please_ take up a collection to have the Oracle execs framed for terrorism and shipped off to Gitmo?
Honestly this is just stupi
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Running Ubuntu 11.04 (Score:2)
I just checked and i'm showing OpenJDK
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That has been the default for some time now. The only reason to install sun-java-6 is if that is the target runtime for, say, a production Java application you happen to be writing, especially if you rely on esoteric command line arguments (-XX:MaxPermSize for example). So while it's not the end of the world, it certainly will cost a day or two of productivity for many Java developers and admins running Ubuntu as they will need to install the official Oracle packages, update alternatives, change symbolic
If only Java were always Java (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in a Java shop. We run Sun Java 6 on a mix of Solaris and Ubuntu. I'll be handrolling a deb [github.com] from the Sun Java tarball precisely because not everything can be trusted to work identically between Sun Java 6 and OpenJDK 6.
We just recently hit a weird bug which turned out to be a "how did that ever work?" moment - revolving around different implementation-specific behaviours in Sun Java 6u24 for Solaris SPARC and Sun Java 6u26 for Linux.
We'll be moving to OpenJDK, but only after thorough testing. OpenJDK 6 is a proper Java, but we've discovered the hard way not to make any such move without thorough testing. Because programmers are human and bugs happen. Never trust, always verify.
Uncool (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand pulling it from the repositories for future installs, but from a user that installed it while the license was still in effect? Really uncool.
Aside from pissing people off in general, just think of all the production servers they may kill by doing this. And the lost customers, time, money..
openjdk has issues though (Score:3)
dunno about this. .....gawd...loathe to say it..."Oracle" Java and by removing OpenJDK.
I ran into an issue lately that only happens with OpenJDK (specifically OpenJDK's implementation of Java Webstart) which was only remedied by installing
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Informative)
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What "difference" are you talking about? There are *no* automatic updates on Apple stuff (OSX or iOS) - you have to agree to them each time. Please stop trolling about things you clearly don't know anything about.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Insightful)
You could argue that by putting in your password when update manager asks for it, you are agreeing to let Canonical update your machine.
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And you'd be correct because that's exactly what you are doing. If you want control of the updates use synaptic and you can pick and choose which updates to install. Now that I think about it you may well be able to refuse individual actions with update manager as well. Generally I just look it over and see if anything is objectionable but have never actually denied any action before.
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One can refuse specific updates from the update manager. I scroll through the list and choose which updates I do and do not want based on information published as to stability and functionality. If some problem has been discovered, I wait a while until a fix is released. This means of course being slightly behind in regard to updates, but generally speaking I do not install things like Java in a browser, I disable scripts, block fetches from other domains, and avoid risky websites (or lock everything down f
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What "difference" are you talking about? There are *no* automatic updates on Apple stuff (OSX or iOS) - you have to agree to them each time. Please stop trolling about things you clearly don't know anything about.
The OP is talking about Apple's ability to remote kill applications for security reasons (already demonstrated on iOS, presumably coming soon on OS/X). This comes from itunes, bypasses all need for acknowlegements and has nothing to do with software updates. I will leave you to stew in the irony of your last sentence.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Informative)
"Already demonstrated" how? To my knowledge, NO app has ever been remotely killed on iOS, though they have said they have the ability to do so. However, both Amazon Kindle (with the unlicensed "1984" edition) and Google (repeatedly to nuke apps that turned out to be trojans) have done so.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Informative)
Nor has any app ever been remotely killed on Ubuntu. FUD much?
Not just that no app has been killed by Ubuntu, but if you switch don't opt in to automatic updates then Ubuntu doesn't even have the ability to do remote kills without your agreement, which, despite the fanbois moderation of my above post, has been confirmed to exist by Steve Jobs himself. [telegraph.co.uk]
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I just checked the 10.7 laptop I'm typing on. Checking for and downloading the updates is automatic, actually installing them is something you get prompted to do and there is no tick box to say "Don't bother me, just do it".
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Informative)
That's not true. I have a Lion system right here and it's not an option.
You can have Software Update fetch updates in the background automatically and let you know when they are downloaded, but it *absolutely does not* install them automatically. You *must* authenticate with an admin account first.
You can turn off background downloading too, it's merely a convenience factor.
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Who told you this? Last time there were updates for my Lion machine it informed me that updates were available and offered me the choice of whether or not to install them.
It's details of MacOS Lion
that have been well published [crn.com] that MacOS Lion has automated security updates. Some updates require approval.
This doesn't preclude the possibility of Apple installing other security updates to installed apps without approval in the future, or of removing 'banned' apps entirely (supposing Apple deemed the a
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they're just going to remove it. If you want OpenJDK, you have to install that by hand.
For almost all users, OpenJDK is just fine and is the one to use. (e.g. any Java plugins in the browser, almost any Java app). Anyone who is affected by this went to some effort to install Sun Java by hand specifically.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Insightful)
Software which someones tested and released under a given JDK was generally using it for a reason. I can, for one, specifically say that a project I'm working on will specifically *not* run under the OpenJDK.
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Yep. Been there, done that.
The problem is that proprietary software is generally badly-written rubbish, well below the typical quality of open source (and many studies have shown this). However, many companies still run proprietary software, and being terrible rubbish with no peer-review it's often only certified against specific versions of Java and will actually break with any other version. Heck, one package we're stuck with was only certified against Sun Java 6 a few months ago, and Java 5 was EOLed end
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious. What specifically is lacking in OpenJDK that causes your project to be incompatible? Finding out from someone who's been-there-done-that is much preferable to hitting that specific brick wall yourself.
I had thought it was only a few things that were different - sound (fixed), serial IO (fixed... I thought) for example.
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What I remember from accidentally using OpenJDK a few years ago... Apache Tomcat, one of the most popular servlet containers, did not work with OpenJDK. The first thing I do with any Linux server is remove OpenJDK and install the latest Sun (now Oracle) version of Java.
I don't know what the incompatibility was, and maybe they have fixed it by now. But I don't care enough about "freedom" to bother with OpenJDK.
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Then you can install Oracle's Java (there is no "Sun Java" any more) yourself. Oracle no longer allows Canonical to distribute updates, and the last version that Canonical was allowed to distribute has security bugs. Canonical won't prevent you from installing any flavor of Java (or any other piece of software) by yourself, but they're not going to stick you with an insecure, buggy package that has no upgrade path, and they're out of other options. If you want to bitch, bitch at Oracle for their bonehead
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Informative)
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We've spent too much money verifying the software which was NOT testing under OpenJDK.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you're going to have a problem in the future, because Oracle is replacing Sun's Java with OpenJDK. It's going to be the "real" java from now on. The summary, like usual, left this important fact out.
Almost right, but not quite. As I understand it, Sun's (now Oracle's) JDK will still exist, but it will no longer be the Reference Implementation. OpenJDK will become the Reference Implementation.
This does, of course, mean that OpenJDK will be the "real" Java, and that there should (in theory) be no differences between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK— and if there are differences, then it's Oracle JDK that's wrong. But Oracle's JDK will still exist.
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If you have Sun Java, rather than OpenJDK, it's because you put it there.
Re:"from user's machines" (Score:5, Informative)
While I love to bash on Ubuntu on every (reasonable and merited) opportunity available, and they certainly aren't scarce, this isn't one of them. As others have already pointed out, the packages were removed because Oracle will not license updates, and the latest distributable version has important security vulnerabilities. It would be irresponsible to keep the current packages in the distribution and illegal to update them.
More importantly, this move is exactly what Oracle wants done, and no, it's not any sort of evil move. Dalibor Topic explains in his blog [livejournal.com] the reasons behind this change in licensing: OpenJDK is (the basis of) the reference implementation for Java 7 [oracle.com], and the Sun (now Oracle) JDK implementation is now (going to be) based on OpenJDK; the gratis, non-free licensing for the Sun (now Oracle) JDK was a temporary solution that's reached the end of its applicability:
It was always intended to be a temporary solution, and the final solution has always been migrating to OpenJDK. Yeah, it sucks, compatibility is far from complete, and things will break as a result of this move, but it's always been the plan, and it's not Canonical fucking it up this time. For reference, as one of the comments in TFA points out, Debian did it too [debian.org].
In short: nothing to see here; move along. If this makes you lose sleep, maybe you shouldn't have used Java, and maybe you should migrate to something better.
Re:Not for long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoah. Tone down on the bitterness man. I wish I had some of your insight into the world - on second thoughts I'm glad I don't.
They've targeted customers who are either spending somebody else's money (mainly the children of the wealthy living off of "daddy's money" or trust funds), those who are financially foolish (people who buy useless gadgets on credit), and those seeking a modern religion (the so-called Apple fanatics)
Yeah - those are the *only* people who buy Apple gadgets. Those millions and millions of foolish people living off daddy's money. Damn them! Damn them to Hell!
This has let them put out sub-par products with pretty horrible limitations,
Yeah, those MacBook Airs are just *rubbish* man. I *totally* can't see why Intel is giving other notebook vendors $100m just to try and come up with a reasonable competitor
but they can still sell them outrageous prices, and coupled with third-world manufacturing it allows them to make a very sizable profit.
obviously Samsung (and by extension Google), Amazon, Motorola, HTC and the rest are *good* companies because the fact that they have to sell their stuff at half the price just to try and get people to buy one and therefore don't make a profit at all means that *their* exploration of third world labour is somehow alright?
TL;DR version: OMFG get off your high horse mr AC anti-apple troll.
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Just like unpopular products are good? The Air is an excellent machine with no comparable competitor.
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Samsung Series 9. Asus Zenbook. If you want to get extreme, Sony VAIO Z.
Unless obviously you meant it in the way that it runs OSX, in which case I'll just shrug.
Re:Not for long? (Score:4, Insightful)
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No one sold a comparable machine 10 years ago, not at any price. It wasn't possible to make a comparable machine 10 years ago.
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That's a question reasonably asked for products that are popular by fiat, or by default.
When one has to spend more money, thereby implicitly rejecting cheaper competitors; when suppliers to said competitors attempt to push them in the same direction; when the market-share owned by these products is almost unbelievably high percentage (Apple owns ~90% of the $1k portable market, IIRC), it would not seem such a reasonable question...
Simon
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No, not all popular products are good, but it's pretty easy to determine the relative quality of a MacBook Air - it's a physical product that many, many people have reviewed and used across the whole gamut of computer users and it gets consistently high marks.
You can try and handwave away that positive experience of many, many people by claiming it's all down to popularity, but it's somewhat wide of the mark.
Personally, I do not care for them, but I can appreciate that it is a very good compact laptop/subno
Re:Not for long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Before I start, let me clarify that I am not a *fanboi* but the primary maintainer of a least a dozen production machines each of Windows 7, OS X, and Ubuntu linux. Therefore I feel I'm qualified to shed some light on your misconceptions. Take this response not as *hate* but as an assumption that you are not willfully ignorant about what you're talking about, and you just need someone knowledgeable to clear up your obvious confusion. That said...
truth is truth
conceded
You wanna know why Linux is dead last and going exactly nowhere?
Dead last on desktops. Number one in the server space. Number one in handhelds. PC ownership has stagnated. The mobile space is where all the growth is happening, and linux-based OS's are eating everyone but Apple's lunch in this field. Even Apple is still relegated to playing a strong second fiddle.
There are no anti-competitve bundling deals with PC distributors in the linux world. There's also little in the way of manufacturer and application support. Those are the real reasons. Less technical and more political than you seem to think.
you people really really REALLY suck at GUIs
This is a gross generalization. Gnome is really no more or less user friendly than any of the commercial alternatives. All of the several different viable options for linux destkop environments have their strengths and faults. It's not any different for Windows or OS X.
While you may think some damned 70s terminal is the essence of nirvana
For at least the last 5 years, use of the terminal on an Ubuntu desktop system is about as central as it is on Windows or OS X. Pros do it for convenience, but it isn't necessary unless you're trying to do something unorthodox. This is an old, dead, troll of an argument against Linux. Try a modern Linux desktop, it's really not as bad as you seem to think it is.
you are missing features that Windows had a fricking decade ago
By the same token, windows is still missing many features Linux had 20 years ago.
Where the fuck is the roll back drivers button? How about the find drivers button? You expect the user to magically know the make/model/rev of any and all pieces of hardware
Driver management in Linux is handled through the package manager, because drivers are software. I haven't needed to roll back a driver, ever. I did so exactly once to enable visual effects and it was complete cake. No CLIs were employed. The last time I needed to use lspci to determine the model of a piece of hardware because it wasn't autodetected was 2006. The last few releases of Ubuntu even notify me when there's a better proprietary (manufacturer) driver than the bundled open one, and automatically install THAT.
you couldn't put all these pieces together into a solid intuitive OS if someone put a gun to the head of RMS
so wait, *you're* the one worried about getting "hate" from "fanbois"? Ummm...
What is Linux now? It is a CLI OS with a GUI shell bolted on top
An OS is not "CLI or GUI". OS's work to abstract hardware from software. That is their purpose. OSX is a mach microkernel OS with a GUI on top. Windows 7 is a NT-family kernel with a GUI on top.
You're obviously really upset about linux. I don't really understand why, it sounds like you're really happy with Win7 and that's fine. You can rage about terminals and drivers, and it's not going to change any Linux users' minds about their choice in OS. And since win7 can't run ZFS and won't take the GUI code out of protected kernel space, your angry rant isn't going to change my mind either.
Point being that choice is good, each OS has its strengths and weaknesses. I salute your right to choose and even though windows is far and away the hardest of the three to administer, and you clearly have no need of the superior features Linux does offer, I'm glad you're happy with it.
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He was talking about Ubuntu - the main offering. As a smart operation, of course Canonical has alternative offerings. Their main distro came with Gnome,
Whether that was good or bad, is a matter of opinion. Personally, I preferred KDE but chopped and changed between the two.
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The impact will be about zero, replace sun-java with openjdk if you need java.
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I know six months ago openjdk did not work with crashplan and I had to set the jdk to sun.
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Yuh. The problem is existing code by mediocre programmers.
Re:Is this April first? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenJDK is a GPL release of Sun's code. It is the official Java (SE) implementation :
http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the [oracle.com]
Re:Is this April first? (Score:5, Interesting)
On Linux, most java developers consider that OpenJDK is the default implementation and that Sun JDK is more or less discontinued.
And yet, a customer that I used to support has an app that will not run on OpenJDK, only on Sun Java. I do not know if it is sniffing the JVM or if it makes use of an undocumented feature AKA bug but it won't even load with OpenJDK. No, I don't have the source.
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Red5 hangs more often on openjdk ;)
Not a fan of IcedTea (Score:5, Interesting)
I have encountered numerous problems in recent years with Java code that simply doesn't work on IcedTea. It's not doing anything clever or undocumented. It runs fine on Windows, on MacOS, and on the same Linux boxes but with a different Java run-time. On some of these projects, we had so many problems that we explicitly no longer support IcedTea and won't even consider support requests from customers who insist on using it.
I don't know about any other JREs based on OpenJDK, but IcedTea is so bug-ridden as to be unusable, and has been for a long time.
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Same experience for me; OpenJDK just doesn't work.
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Bet it's a subtle bug that only works because of implementation-specific behaviour. We just got bitten by one of those, relating to different behaviour between Sun Java 6 on Solaris SPARC and Sun Java 6 on Linux. Never trust, always verify!
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You are crazy. I'm a Java developer, who uses Linux, and I'd neer consider OpenJDK as any sort of alternative to SunJDK. Its pretty much the first thing I install on my Linux boxes. The Oracle/Sun supplied JRE is a lot more stable, and I'd assume is better performant as well.
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This is what you get when you have infrastructure that is build around one centrally maintained dependency tree, you are slave to whatever decisions they make. It's not even a new problem, similar software removals against the users will have happened with Gnome2 vs Gnome3 and even back with Gnome1 vs Gnome2 and counterless times when a working version of Gimp was replaced with a broken one and only fixed month later. This one seems a bit more sinister as from the looks of it it seems they remove it in a re
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Well there is always Linux from Scratch.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org]
Have fun!
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The single, centrally-managed, integration-tested and conflict-resolved tree is sort of the main advantage of Debian, though. I can see alternate possibilities, but they would be quite different models for distribution management.
Compared to the situation on, say, OSX (which I use more often these days), what I like about Debian's one tree is that there's less buck-passing. If it's in Debian, it's a bug somewhere in Debian. I might've reported it to the wrong package, but then the maintainer will usually re
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why does a distribution license expiry mean that people who already have copies may no longer use it?
Lack of security updates. Canonical thinks that if you want to keep it, you can just apt pin it, while people who might not even know they have it installed are better off not being exposed to its problems.
Re:This won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't - bad summary conflates "no license to distribute" with "security hole" - the security hole is why Ubuntu needs to fix this, but the only fix they can apply is to remove the package since they can't distribute the fixed version any more.
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Uh, OpenJDK is now the official Java release from Oracle, the closed source JDK is basically obsolete. You shouldn't use it unless you really need to.
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Not quite. The browser plugin is being disabled immediately and at some point in the future they'll also be pushing out dummy packages to remove the Sun JDK from user's machines altogether. See the mailing list post [ubuntu.com].
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If they're really out to get you it's not paranoia.
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That would be us! I'll be handrolling a deb for now, and then we'll do extensive testing to move to OpenJDK.
Ah fuck, that means OpenJDK on devs' Windows boxes. And there's no OpenJDK 6 for Windows, only 7. And I thought Java 5 to Java 6 was politically tedious. Arsebiscuits.
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Really? I've had no trouble running it on OpenJDK, despite what the download pages claim.