Apache FOP user survey

As just announced on the XML Graphics users lists, we (or rather Jeremias who has done the work) just started a user survey to get feedback on the usage of the different Java versions (especially Java 1.3).

So if you are a FOP user (or plan to use FOP) please take the time (just a few minutes) and participate in the survey

I'm curious on the results.

Java 1.3 on Ubuntu

As we (still) provide Java 1.3 binaries for Apache FOP (for rumored AIX users who are still stuck there ;-) I was going to need a JDK 1.3 for my Ubuntu (Edgy Edge) system to do some testing.

So I went to Blackdown (remember that Sun didn't provide Java for Linux in the early days...) and downloaded the "latest" JDK 1.3, which is Java2 SDK 1.3.1-02b-FCS.

After the installation it threw the following error on the first run:

/home/chrisg/j2sdk1.3.1/bin/i386/native_threads/java: relocation error:
/home/chrisg/j2sdk1.3.1/jre/lib/i386/libjava.so: symbol __libc_waitpid,
version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

Some googling turned up that SUN used a private interface from glibc. Well, no easy fix for this...

A closer look at java.sun.com lead to the Java Download Archive (albeit Sun makes it bit hard to find) where I found J2SE 1.3.1.
After the installation the following commands are needed:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

and then you should have a working JDK1.3.

The testing (of FOP) revealed some strange errors but that's another story...