Update from the Java front

So, yesterday I blogged about Free Java implementation Kaffe, and today I have some updates on that.

First of all, dalibor on #kaffe suggested me to try CVS head, and of course it make sense, considering the fluent state of the project, so I added a CVS live ebuild to my overlay, keyworded -*.

The he explained that the problem is with GCC 4.1 that changed something in exception handling, and provided me a patch to try out, that actually worked. The main problem is that it forces -O0 to build.

After patching Kaffe, and building it with those totally un-optimised flags, the result is quite good, as Yahoo games works fine, albeit quite slow, and the CPU usage is about 70%. This makes Kaffe un-optimal for people relying a lot on Java, but make it good enough for me that I don’t use it much a part from playing literati from time to time. Just a note: you need to disable KIO support in Konqueror or loading java applets will fail.

Following this Java improvement, I have to thank sbriesen for helping me setting up my Epson scanner; it seems like I need only the firmwares out of media-gfx/iscan, and then snapscan backend works fine. Yuhuu.

Okay now I can actually reduce my OSX usage to the minimum, as to do copies I can just use Kooka. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find an application (yet) that is able to read the negatives out of the scanner and split them in three different photos as it’s done by Epson’s utilities. I’m not a graphic person, so I have no idea where to start, and thus I can’t help with it, but I’m ready to test anything if someone is going to work on such an application.

So now the other main binary thing I rely on is the nvidia driver, that’s going to take the way of the sea next week most likely, when my 9250 will come. €55 might e a good price for Freedom. I’ll tell if I have any quirk with that card that might be needed.

Oh yes and I (with a bit of luck rarely) rely on win32codecs for some wmv9 files, but that’s not going to be a problem as soon as FFmpeg will support VC-1 codec, so I’m not even considering that an issue, for how little times I actually need it.