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I Just Installed Fedora Core 4 on my IBM Thinkpad T30 (the download speed did pick up.) I Encountered three gotcha's along the way:

• I needed to specify linux ide=nodma on the boot prompt, otherwise Mediacheck would fail
• My swap partition is not mounted. There is an error on line 13 of my /etc/fstab.
• When I close the lid on the laptop, it wouldn't go to sleep mode.

Aside from those, everything is clean and easy, just like before. The sound, video, Ethernet, and wireless network (Onorico?) cards are all detected and work flawlessly.

Exciting new features in this release of Red Hat's Linux system include OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta, and Free Software Java based on gcj, GNU Classpath and ecj (The Java compiler in Eclipse JDT), including a natively compiled version of Eclipse 3.1 M6, with the Eclipse CDT and pydev (Eclipse Python development plugin).

It is really nice to see both "Java Development" and "Eclipse" mentioned in the package selection screen, alongside "GNOME Software Development" and "KDE Software Development". I know some Java programmers are skeptical of the whole Free Software Java movement. They would say things like "I just don't care if it's free or not" or "If you don't use Sun, all bets are off for portability" or "What do you mean Java is not free?" My answer is that it doesn't matter that we (the end developers—end users of the Java development tools) don't care. It's the vendors opinions that matters. It has always been that way for both proprietary and open source tools. In this case, Red Hat and others cared enough to put real resources on the development of Free Software Java. And they are showing what they've done.

And what they've done is something very interesting—A natively compiled Eclipse.

To appreciate the significance of this achievement, you need to go all the way back to June 1998, and reread the original paper that launched gcj. In the seven years since, we've witnessed the development of a clean room implementation of the Java compiler in front of our eyes. Sometimes I wished the Sun team is as transparent and responsive as the gcj team.

My initial observation is that the native version's startup time and memory consumption on the laptop (P4M(?) at 1.8GHz) are comparable to that of the bytecode version running on a Fedora Core 3 box (Athlon XP 2700+ 2.2GHz.)

Here's a screenshot of native Eclipse running with a CDT project. Once you get passed the original shock of "Oh, a native version of Eclipse!" you soon realize that "It's just Eclipse." You use it just as you would the regular version of Eclipse. In other words, "It's not that big a deal."

Although the gcj compiler and the GNU Classpath libraries (and the Kaffe JVM, etc.) have been available in Fedora Core (and Red Hat Linux before it) for a long time now. The substantially improved Java offerings in Fedora Core 4 signifies another step in the spread of Java—to Linux desktop machines and potentially to other more obscure platforms where Sun is either not willing to invest the time to port the JDK or not willing to grant a license for third parties to port the JDK. I still remember the time when Sun refused to support their JDK on Linux.

I haven't played with the other 122 Java packages that came with Fedora Core 4. But I've heard about a natively compiled Tomcat 5. I'll try putting this blog on that thing some time, just because I can!

I took only a cursory look at OpenOffice 2.0 Beta. It started up a lot faster than the previous version, felt snappier, and looked a lot sharper. I've heard from multiple heavy MS Office users telling me that OpenOffice 2.0 is good enough now. Kudo's to the OpenOffice team (mostly Sun employees?) for their hard work.