OpenBSD: Against all odds, I'm building Java

If you want Java in OpenBSD, it's not easy to get it. Not impossible, but definitely not easy.

First of all, it's a port, not a package, and due to Sun's licensing restrictions for Java, when you run the build on the port, you are instructed to, on your own, fetch nine files (some source, some binary) from a variety of locations and place those files in /usr/ports/distfiles.

Once I jumped through these hoops, I got a persistent checksum error with one of the files I grabbed, xalan-j_2_7_0-bin.tar.gz. In fact, the exact problem I had is described in this Daemon Forums thread.

Curiously enough, three additional downloads of xalan from two separate sites didn't solve the checksum issue.

What did cause the error to stop and the build to proceed was grabbing this line from one of the examples in the Daemon Forums thread:

SHA256 (xalan-j_2_7_0-bin.tar.gz) = h4yOtu7hVRrkMMLboFQmMphW/8BBOyAX3S1O5kjFxfc=

and replacing that same line in /usr/ports/devel/jdk/1.5/distinfo

The original line looked no different, but this swap (done as root) seemed to make everything OK, and I'm well into the build of Java (or, more specifically, jdk).

I hope to be able to run Java apps via both the Firefox and Opera Web browsers. It's one of the final missing pieces in my use of OpenBSD as my main working OS.

Right now the build continues. I'll update when it either finishes or otherwise errors out. (You can see how optimistic I am about ports in OpenBSD at this moment; not so much, that is).