Quite a few people have reported problems building icedtea6 or needed dependencies on our IRC channel and as the build is quite resource intensive, Caster has now made binary builds for icedtea6. The package is available via layman using:

layman -a java-overlay
emerge icedtea6-bin

The binary package should also make it easier to bootstrap the from source build. The binaries are built in stable chroots so they should run for our stable users too. Please report any problems to https://bugs.gentoo.org with [java-overlay] in the subject. For amd64 users this should be the easiest way to get a 64 bit browser plugin.

betelgeuse@pena ~ $ eselect java-vm list
Available Java Virtual Machines:
  [1]   blackdown-jdk-1.4.2
  [2]   ibm-jdk-bin-1.5
  [3]   kaffe
  [4]   openjdk-1.7  user-vm
  [5]   sun-jdk-1.4
  [6]   sun-jdk-1.5
  [7]   sun-jdk-1.6  system-vm
  [8]   sun-jdk-1.6.0.02
  [9]   sun-jdk-1.7

http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/java-experimental/dev-java/openjdk/openjdk-1.7.0.0_alpha12.ebuild

Takes me about 45 minutes to build on:

betelgeuse@pena ~ $ uname -p
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz

Please note the word experimental in the url. Now I am off to bed for today. Have an exam in C programming coming up tomorrow.

http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/liftoff

betelgeuse@pena ~/openjdk/control/build/linux-i586 $ ./bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-betelgeuse_08_may_2007_21_32-b00)
OpenJDK Tiered VM (build 1.7.0-internal-betelgeuse_08_may_2007_21_32-b00, mixed mode)

Stay tuned for more packaging updates on Gentoo.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176856

So soon ant-1.7.0 should be hitting the stable Gentoo machines. The biggest benefit here is that full ant with it's big dependency tree shouldn't be pulled in so often any more. Not all of the packages are migrated to splitted ant yet but the most important ones like Tomcat are. If you are interested in how this works I recommend you to take a look at the Ant guide we wrote:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/ant-guide.xml

If you use the java overlays see the following link:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/March_2007_Summary#Changesinoverlays

The changes should allow a better experience to users of our overlays as we now have one central overlay where things are expected to work for layman usage and after we get it cleaned there shouldn't be any experimental work in there. Initially I just moved migrated-java-experimental-overlay as java-overlay so initially there is still some experimental stuff left in that overlay but they should not have any keywords. If you have any problems, use our mailing list or IRC channel to get help.

MX4J is an open source implementation of the JMX and JMX Remote API (JSR 160) specifications. The alternatives for mx4j are sun-jmx, which is fetch restricted, and 1.5 jdks where jmx is integrated into the JDK. Because of the fetch restriction a decision was made a while ago to use the OSS implementation. Because of the mx4j-tools that came with the dev-java/mx4j package the deptree was quite huge. For this reason wltjr added the java5 use flag to Tomcat. This use flag avoided depending on stuff that is provided by 1.5 jdks any way. Last Thursday this problem was solved for good by using the solution from http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152924. Now the latest ~x86 versions of dev-java/commons-modeler and www-servers/tomcat depend on the new dev-java/mx4j-core that has very minimal dependencies. If you are using ~arch, upgrading to these versions might help you clean some java packages with emerge -a --depclean.

Some of you have contacted me about my Avatar and not liking the military look of it. Well probably it is not such of a common sight in other countries but bear with me, I only have 27 mornings left.

Oh goodie. I decided to try the new xcb stuff so I turned on the xcb use flag in libX11 and mesa just to find out that java from sun does not work with it. Proprietary software is so much fun. Luckily a change is happening for the better as all of Sun's java implementation will be released under the GPL in the future.

java: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock' failed.