I agree with the original poster. Not having the java plugin is fine on servers, but for users here who *do* use it as a desktop, my choices are to either not update openjdk or install Sun's Java,
Indeed, installing Sun JDK is an alternative. I already tried it with the following procedure:
sudo yum erase *gcj* sudo yum erase *openjdk* sudo sh jdk-6u17-linux-x64-rpm.bin
But then I had to: sudo ln -s /usr/java/default/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so in order to get the browser plugin to work (thanks to [1])
Did you face a similar issue? Or did I do something wrong?
which makes openjdk pointless.
Our policy is to use exclusively FLOSS software that we can possibly rebuild, and are free to redistribute etc. Especially for Java which is our main platform. That's the point of OpenJdk for us. Unfortunately, as I put previously, the provided implementation has blocking issues, even on the server/headless side.
I do believe that with Java now GPL, Linux+Java can be a great platform. But there are years of parallel development paths and, if I can put it that way, mutual distrust, that need to be overcome. So it is still a bit painful (but much much better than a few years ago!).
I have the feeling that Red Hat is supporting Java on the long term, e.g. with their ownership of JBoss, and their contributions to OpenJdk/IcedTea (for example the very interesting work of Gary Benson on alternative architectures such as PPC, see [2]).
So I'm very excited to see how Java support will look like on RHEL/CentOS 6...
[1] http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-install-enable-java-plugin... [2] http://gbenson.net/