forum.excito.org

I see this sort of reply a lot -- certain things don't work on Excito because the system software is too old, and to upgrade pieces of it would be high risk.

This is blocking the deployment of certain tools we'd like to VAR out with a Bubba. When would the next kernel upgrade be taking place?

You're not just talking about any old upgrade. glibc is at the very heart of the OS, and mucking with it will most likely give you severe depencitis. But, by all means, give it a try.

Ubi

Hi,

Regarding software being to old to run any decent java software. This is correct. It should be much easier to get this up and running on a more modern Linux installation.

It is however not dependent of the kernel as Ubi also points out. (The current kernel should be modern enough to run any Java virtual machine.) But more so on the application and libraries of the distribution.

So when we get the Etch install ready things should be a lot easier. Note however that this might include a reinstall of your Bubba in worst case.

Regarding kernel upgrades, this is most likely nothing that we will push out as a regular upgrade. This since if that operation fails for some reason your Bubba will be more or less unusable since the kernel is stored in nvram and if the process of upgrading it is interrupted will leave this memory in an inconsistent state and Bubba wont boot any more. It is of course possible to do this upgrade manually.

/Tor

FYI

A sent an email to a Sun employee asking about options for a VM on ARM/Linux. This is the response I got:



Thank you for your interest in Sun's Java SE for Embedded Use
technology.

The requirements for the embedded JRE for Linux/ARM eval
currently available at our website as a download are as follows:

* ARM9 v5 compatible processor
* Little-endian mode
* Soft-float (big-endian doubles)
* Linux Kernel 2.6.8 or later
* glibc 2.3.2 or later
* ABI is not EABI (EABI support started with gcc 4.1)
* Headless: no support for video/keyboard/mouse

Does your operating platform meet these requirements?

We are aiming to support other configurations of ARM-based
operating platforms in the near future, so please make sure to
check back at our website during the next few months. Links to
the corresponding new embedded Java SE JREs should appear
on the following page:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/embedded/offerings.html

The downloads accessible through this page are all 90-days eval
headless versions intended for embedded use. We do provide
other licensing arrangements as well (e.g., removing the 90-days
use restriction, headful, etc.), but these usually require an intended
use that goes beyond personal use only, and where there would
also be some benefit to Sun. Does your intended use go beyond
personal use only? If so, please let me know and we'll take it
from there.

I hope the above information has been helpful to you. If you
have any further questions at any time, please don't hesitate to
let us know.

Thanks and regards,

-Carlos
________________________________________________________

Carlos B. Lucasius
Java SE Embedded and Real-Time Engineering
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I believe the bubba is ARM9 v4. So just on that point alone it would not meet Sun's requirements.

The latest versions Java not working on the bubba is a disappointment. It has been a lesson to me that Java isn't necessarily a write-once-run-anywhere language --- unlike C

On the flip side, the lack of Java support will hone my C/C++, Perl, and PHP skills.

I'm curious what other languages are available and appropriate for the bubba?

-John

JohnC wrote: I'm curious what other languages are available and appropriate for the bubba?

-John

As i wrote some time ago, Freepascal have support for Arm, i use it on bubba everyday.
Freepascal support many dialect of pascal. ObjectPascal in particular (the language of Delphi) is a very effective compiled object-oriented language with strong typing and a clean syntax.
It has a good cross platform library but you can also interface with libc or windows api or whatever library

so anyone can report if java works for the new Etch distribution ?

Any news about this? That is, has anyone been successful running java on bubba after etch-upgrade?

I can only speak for myself of course, but one of the main reasons for me to upgrade to etch would be the potential better java-support, so it would really help if someone could confirm it working.

I'm to much of a rookie to dare experimenting with the upgrade without some kind of hard evidence first

/Tompa

Hi,

I have done a little testing on this.

On Etch it is possible to install gij for runtime and gcj or ecj for compiler with classpath as class library. This should give a somewhat useful environment. I have however failed to get tomcat5 up and running. (This could however be me not used to that environment)

I earlier mentioned CACAO as a hot candidate for javavm. And i have talked some with one of their developers. And he actually claims that it should be feasable to run such a setup on an environment like Bubbas with CACAO.

Unfortunately there is no package in Debian for CACAO and i have still not managed to compile it. If i get somewhere with that i will let you know.

/Tor

Thats great news tor, nice to see that progress have been made!

thanks
gij works perfect
cheers
Eek

I want to be able to run java on my bubba... when i was googling i found this german company with a simular hardware.

please advice, is this "bubba doable"?:

http://jamvm.sourceforge.net/

ARM: Originally ported and tested on the iPAQ running Linux (3950, with xscale PXA250 processor, though it should work on StrongARM). Later development on Neo1973 (ARM920T core). Little and Big Endian machines are supported, soft/kernel FP emulation, and OABI or EABI.

http://www.taskit.de/en/products/portux ... /index.htm

Develop in C++ or Java
Portux Panel-PC Atmel® AT91RM9200 with ARM920T core

The GNU tools for developing on ARM-based computers are included on the software CD. The precompiled toolchain and GNU debugger (GDB) for linux-based host systems enables cross-compiling to x86 based systems. This allows you to compile the example programs or your own application directly and immediately, without major effort.

To simplify development of graphic applications, the free Nano-X Window System is included, complete with source code and example programs.

The GDB facilitates remote debugging. The GBD itself runs on the development computer and can also be used conventionally with graphical GUIs.

JamVM and GNU Classpath provide you with a Java interpreter and a class library. You can develop Java applications with any popular Java compiler (e.g. from Sun TM).

Hello, i've tried this and it works

If you're using last Debian etch, just install jamvm with apt and you're ready to go!

apt-get install jamvm

it installs classpath and all required stuff (which is quite a lot).
you still have to compile the classes on your PC afaik.
i've tried some very simple programs and they all works (also with socket connections).

But still it is'nt possible with orginal os you have to upgrade to etch?

i'm quite sure it is possible even with the old OS, you could first try to see if a valid version of jamvm is in the repositories (very improbable), or elseway install jamvm and classpath from sources.
it's going to be harder than with etch, expecially if you're not used with linux.

btw i tryed installing tomcat
i unzipped the package for version 4.1 light. i copied a custom start script for jamvm found on the internet, modified said script for use with my path and started it
it took about 10 minutes to come online!
when it did, i tried entering the main admin page, but it's a jsp and jamvm can't compile jsp (returning the error took about 5 minutes ). So i skipped to the servlet example folder and run a couple of servlets.. to my great surprise, they worked it took some seconds for the first run, then each servlet ran relatively fast.
They're just hello world anyway.. I don't think you can actually build anything useful.
Anyway i stopped tomcat and now it doesnt' start anymore, it keeps crashing, maybe there's something dirty in the temp files.

Well i think i can conclude that while bubba does incredible things with its low specs, it really cant handle a full java application server.
Anyway it may be interesting to try and run some custom mini web server such as this one.