Java: March 2009 Archives

I came back to the OpenBSD laptop this morning after what was supposed to be an all-night build of Java, which comes from OpenBSD's ports system and requires quite a bit of compiling and other voodoo.

So how did it end?

I don't have Java.

Sometime during the build, my /usr filesystem filled up. I set aside 6 gigabytes for /usr when I installed OpenBSD 4.4 on this laptop, and while I have a fair amount of software on the drive, I did have a fair amount of space left. Right now I'm doing a make clean and make clean=depends on the port, which is freeing up all that space, and I have 2.7 GB and counting.

That's not enough.

The OpenBSD FAQ does warn you to leave extra space in /usr if you're going to be building applications from ports instead of using packages (which I prefer in all instances where the package I need is available):

Compiling some ports from source can take huge amounts of space on your /usr and /tmp partitions. This is another reason we suggest using pre-compiled packages instead.

I've heard that building Java requires a lot of space. I just didn't know how much. And I don't have it in this installation.

How do I feel about compiling applications from source? I've never been a big fan of it. But with proper coding, documentation and guidance, it can work.

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).