tech news – Page 65 – Kev's Development Toolbox

July 9, 2007

XBox360 failures to cost Microsoft $1bn

Microsoft have extended the warranty period for all XBox 360 owners to 3 years, and have agreed to cover all costs for replacing repaired or replaced units so far, and during the extended 3 year period.

Microsoft’s XBox 360 has been experiencing a high number of heat related failures, the so called ‘ring of death’, since the lights on the front of the console display a red ring when the unit fails, as many as 1 in 3 according to stores such as EB Games and Best Buy. This is in comparison to approximately 1% for the PS3, and zero known returned units for the Wii.

July 6, 2007

OpenJDK – currently won’t build on Windows

After spending a few hours downloading and installing all the prereqs on Windows XP (Cygwin, Visual Studio .NET 2003) to build the OpenJDK, I got to the point to discover that the OpenJDK will currently not build on Windows, because there are files missing in the binary ‘plug’.

The OpenJDK comes in a couple of different downloads, one of the files being the ‘binary plug’ – this contains platform specific binary code that is currently not available for licensing reasons to be part of the open source OpenJDK, and so is provided ‘as is’, as the original binary files that are shipped with current JDKs. Unfortunately, since there is no mention of this on the project website (the Windows binary plug download leads you to believe that it is complete and all you need to be able to build on Windows) until you get to this step in the build process, you find out that there is one file missing in the binary files, t2k.lib, and without this you cannot build on Windows.

This missing file is described in this bug logged on the Sun site.

Apparently you can build on other platforms, Linux, Mac OS X, so I’ll investigating the Linux build instead for the time being until this issue is resolved.

June 27, 2007

Building OpenJDK on Windows XP

I spent some time yesterday looking into how you build the OpenJDK on Windows XP using Netbeans, and ran into some issues with various dependencies from Cygwin’s make (not finding uname, and some other Unix commands). I’m not sure if I keep plugging away at this if it can be done since there aren’t any definite instructions on how to run the build on Windows, but if I find out a way then I’l post my findings here.

June 27, 2007

First fork of OpenJDK?

RedHat have annouced they are forking the OpenJDK code base to develop their own JDK, with the intention of replacing the ‘encumbered’ portions (parts of the prior JDK that Sun can not legally open source), with code from the IcedTea project.

IcedTea is a open source project to provide an easier to use build framework for building the JDK, plus aims to provide re-writes for the encumbered parts of the current JDK.