[1494] in athena10
Replace Sun Java with OpenJDK? [Re: Updates to
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anders Kaseorg)
Tue Mar 10 17:24:34 2009
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:23:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
cc: Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200903102100.n2AL0uOI011944@outgoing.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0903101704120.15595@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Alex T Prengel wrote:
> so should we make the latter the default on cluster machines instead?
Can we consider moving to OpenJDK by default instead of Sun Java?
(Packages openjdk-6-* instead of sun-java6-*.)
OpenJDK is Sun’s official project to open-source Sun Java. (It includes
over 99% of the Sun Java code, with open source replacements for the few
remaining proprietary components, which Sun licensed from other companies
in a way that prevents them from being open-sourced.)
It works much better than the Sun version in my experience, because it is
better integrated with the system. For example, it uses the system
installed certificates, including the MIT CA, which allows you to use it
with XVM.
Since OpenJDK is Ubuntu’s preferred version of Java, installing the
openjdk-6-* packages will automatically set it to be the system default
java (priority 1061, as opposed to gcj’s 1042).
It is possible to install both openjdk-6-* and sun-java6-*; I don’t care
so much about the latter being present, but I would still advocate making
(leaving) OpenJDK the default.
Anders
