Released today: new versions of IcedTea. It usually takes a while for an announcement to appear on Andrew’s blog, but the mailing list announcement was enough for me. Not quite unexpected, since Oracle was huffing and puffing yesterday when the company joined other security-challenged companies like Microsoft and Adobe in what’s lovingly called “patch tuesday“, so I was kind of expecting an OpenJDK follow-up. The flurry of patches that I saw today was a sure sign.
So I got to compile OpenJDK 7u51 using the IcedTea 2.4.4 framework. As with every Java release, this one fixes a slew of security holes. Let me say in full, ”Update 51 Build 00” of OpenJDK 7 addresses these issues:
Please update your installed openjdk or openjre packages with this new version! You’ll notice that browsers like Firefox and Chrome/Chromium no longer load Java applets by default and ask you for explicit approval to load and run them.
I tested as usual whether jMol and Minecraft (both standalone Java applications) were still working – they do! And again testing the browser plugin was a challenge. Orcacle’s java checker did not work… after the icedtea-web plugin itself loaded properly:
This time the plugin triggered an error “net.sourceforge.jnlp.LaunchException: Fatal: Application Error: Unknown Main-Class. Could not determine the main class for this application.” The test at javatester.org was fine though.
Get my packages – they have been compiled on Slackware 13.37 and are usable on 13.37 as well as 14.0, 14.1 and -current! Get them preferably from a mirror site (faster downloads):
http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , the primary location
http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , the community mirror (bandwidth-capped)
http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , my own fast US mirror
http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/openjdk/ , fast UK mirror, needs a day to get in sync
Further packages that are recommended/required:
Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web (OpenJDK itself does not contain such a plugin).
Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.
Note that you should only install one of the two packages, either openjdk or openjre, do not install both at the same time or things will break! The openjdk package contains the jre (java runtime) as well as the java development kit.
Eric