John Summerfield wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Scot E. Wilcoxon wrote:
>
> > Anyone have an estimate of the minimum configuration
> > needed for the Linux JRE? That is, what's the smallest
> > system which can run Linux Java programs, not the JDK?
> > (I happen to be wondering about 486 12M RAM/20M disk
> > at the moment)
>
> I'm running jre on a 486, 16 Mb w/o problems. No gui though (it's not
> needed for the tasks I want done). I have a 486dx33 8 Mb macine here: I
> expect that would do the same tasks (but less quickly as the CPU's slower).
>
> 20 Mb disk will be a problem: I'm not even sure you can get a reasonably
> functional Linux system in so little. If you're on a LAN you can load java
> across it without difficulty.
I'd like to comment on this point and John Summerfield's other email
on this topic this morning. Here John says if you're networked you
can load java class files from someplace else -- true enough, just point
the java.rmi.server.codebase at the machine with your application
classfiles. However, you will need some minimal java installation on
the local machine to run the stub that loads everything else. I have
found that even cutting out AWT and other unneeded stuff, the remaining
classes.zip is still about 2 MB. Oh, well.
But in John's other message, he recommends using jikes for compiling.
I tried this, and some of the class files cause verification exceptions
when they are loaded across the network -- the problem doesn't appear
if the classes are loaded locally, since verification is turned off
(by default) for these classes. Verification failure is a known jikes bug.
So you might have to bite the bullet and use javac to compile if you
want to load remote classes. So far as I can tell, the bytecodes are
correct and the verification failure is the only problem, but I'm
not sure.
Hope this helps,
Robert Dodier
