Programming: Java and jdk/NetBSD

I am sure that many of you have heard of the language Java. It is an object-oriented programming language first introduced by Sun Microsystems. It is often used for scripting in applets online. I don't know much of it, but we learn it each week at the WHHS Computer Club. A good tutorial for Java that I use and the Computer Club as well uses can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSjav. Now, for NetBSD and pkgsrc compatibility.

The pkgsrc/NetBSD page for jdk does not work. However, after doing some googling, I have found another link for downloading jdk, located here: http://www.duh.org/NetBSD/java2/.

This is a download page for the Java 2 SDK (Software Development Kit). It is big, though (44 MB, I think). And that's compressed. Make sure you have space for it.

New Stuff; Return to Computing with Unix

Hello, this is xatapu. I apologize for not posting for several days, and thankfully Harry covered that. I am back, ready to discuss Unix and Sun and Java and whatever else you want. I will have a new post about Java and another one about Debian and another one on....um....well.......you'll see.

Spotlight: Solaris

Many of you may have heard of the operating system Solaris. It is the operating system that Sun Microsystems introduced in the early 1990s. It replaced Sun's earlier Unix-based operating system. Today Solaris is open source, and you can get Solaris 10 for free. It is very innovative, and among its innovations is Sun's own file system, ZFS, which is an advanced 128-bit file system. Solaris also comes with a GNOME-like desktop environment, the Java Desktop System. There are releases for both PC and SPARC platforms. And, of course, jdk runs on it. To learn more, go to http://sun.com/solaris/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Operating_Environment.

The vi editor

Once, or maybe twice or more, all of us have had to use vi at some point. Maybe we used it to edit rc.conf, or maybe it was used to write our first document, or maybe it was the first application we ever used from the prompt. To many of us (including me) it is an extremely rigid, hard to use, and counter-intuitive editor. But vi, in general, stands as the most well-known and ubiquitous editor for Unix or Linux, although later Emacs took this position. vi (for visual inter face :) ) was created originally in 1976 by the UC-Berkeley student Bill Joy, who later worked at Sun Microsystems. It replaced ed (ex), Unix's first editor. For those of you who have heard of or used DOS'S EDLIN.EXE, know what this editor is like. Vi was sort of an update of this for Unix. It became very commonly used as an "all-for-one" editor, and it is especially typist and ASCII-friendly. While rather archaic, vi is very efficient, and, once you get used to it, it starts getting easier to work with. Overall, vi was one of the first all-purpose Unix editor to be commonly known and well distributed.