I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu (“Goosy Gander”, or something). There’s some cool new features that I really enjoy, like working Bluetooth™ support.
For kicks I turned on all the neat-o gee whiz graphics features (like that über cool compviz desktop cube thingy). Frankly, they were pretty cool to look at, but not all that useful so I turned them off. Good thing too, since they require the restricted drivers which apparently cause the suspend function on my laptop to fail. Sadly, I still haven’t quite sorted out my problems with hooking up to an external monitor. I have it working on almost every projector I’ve come across except for the ones used at the JavaPolis conference last month (they apparently draw power from USB somehow, and I think that this threw things for a loop). I need to sort out what’s going on there. But I digress.
With the update, I’ve noticed that Java isn’t particular stable. Applications running on a JVM (version 5 or 6; I haven’t tried 1.4), including at least four different versions of Eclipse, have been crashing on me. They just stop. Sometimes, when I quit a Java application, the process doesn’t die. I haven’t had enough time to sort out why it’s happening. I have a few logs that I’ve been rooting through, but haven’t yet sorted out any consistent pattern. I read a couple of posts on the Ubuntu forum which points a finger at the indexing service, trackerd, but turning it off doesn’t seem to clear up the problem. Is anybody else experiencing this?
To work around the problem, I’ve switched from the Sun JVM to Apache Harmony, which seems to be working just fine. The one problem with Harmony that I’ve encountered is that either Harmony doesn’t support hot method replace, or Eclipse doesn’t recognize that Harmony supports it. Once I sort out which one it is, I’ll file the appropriate bug reports. Whatever the case, in response, I’ve been running my development workbench on Harmony, and testing my applications using the Sun JVM.
If you are running Eclipse (for Java development) on Harmony, you should get the integration plug-in which helps Eclipse to find the Harmony JARs and source.
