Sun jdk & jre in non-free!

Related to work on EDOS project, I've been working on improving some java stuff in cooker..

Now we have packages for Sun's jdk & jre, 1.5.0 & 1.6.0, and guess what, they can both be installed at the same time and they're even compatible with jpackage! Sun added a new license for their jdk/jre last year that allowed for redistribution by linux distributors. This opened up for us to make our own packages that we can distribute!

Now we have packages for Sun's jdk & jre, 1.5.0 & 1.6.0, and guess what, they can both be installed at the same time and they're even compatible with jpackage!

A lot of time was wasted/spent on this, trying to package binary software, following a very restrictive license while also staying compatible with jpackage and still produce quality packages is actually way harder than you'd think!

These packages are available to everyone now through the new non-free repository, this means that everyone should get java easily working out of the box with browser plugin (for i586 at least) and also working seamlessly with existing java packages. This is really good news, especially for those tired of mess with all the java packages, my frustration when starting to poke around with thesse a month back was really high!

With Sun gpl'ing java this seem a bit wasted, but not really, no gpl jdk/jre of use to us will be released before 2007.1 and with 2007.1 beginning to look so darn good already, this will make it even better!

Boy do I hope 2007.1 will be even more successful than 2007.0, and everything indicates that it should be so far! :)

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