I installed Ubuntu 8.10, Alpha 6 on my Mac Book Pro  (2nd generation) last night to give it a whirl.  I didn’t do anything with bootcamp, just a straight install.  The installer was fine, it went it’s normal route.  When I rebooted it took a while – I guess this is expected when booting an alternate OS.

The fun started when I logged in. What appeared to be a fully working install – wasn’t.  The touchpad was slow and almost non responsive. I boosted the acceleration and  other settings, but to no avail.  It was unusable.

Audio worked, but not the audio out on the side. It didn’t switch over to optical output like it does with Leopard installed.

Dual monitors would only go into mirror mode. Even after I fiddled around with the settings I couldn’t get my desktop spanned across the second display.

It’s sad, but I had to go back to Leopard on the same night because I just don’t have the time to fool around with Ubuntu on my Mac to make it work the way I want it to.

Given that this is still only an Alpha release of Ubuntu I won’t count it out yet for being on my Mac.  Once the proper release comes out, I’ll give it another try.  But until then, Fail.

I was having some trouble running Eclipse 3.3 Europa on Hardy Heron.  It was unstable, crashing a lot, and hogging way more ram than it normally hogs.

Then I realized what I’d forgotten to do on this fresh install.  I forgot to simply ’sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun’ and voila, it works like a charm.

Eclipse doesn’t work well with the gjc java (the ‘free’ and default) Hopefully this little thing won’t be an issue in the future when sun java 7 (open java) is ready to rock the free world.

Source Install

First, make sure all php packages are updated — if you update PHP after installing this, it will likely segfault.

For the purpose of this, I’m using Ubuntu 7.10, and Java 6 (sun-java6)


First, get the build essential, as well as php5-dev, sun java and automake

# apt-get install build-essential php5-dev sun-java6-jre \
    sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-source automake

Second, get the PHP/Java bridge source.

# cd /usr/src
# wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/php-java-bridge/php-java-bridge_5.2.0.tar.gz
# tar xzfv php-java-bridge_5.2.0.tar.gz

And, install.

# cd /usr/src/php-java-bridge-5.2.0
# phpize
# ./configure --with-java=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03,/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03
# make
# chmod +x install.sh
# ./install.sh

Answering the questions for the install script is fairly simple. It looks for some tomcat stuff for the servlet portion of the Java Bridge, but we won’t be using it.

Copy *.inc to someplace it can be found.

# mkdir /usr/share/php/java
# cp *.inc /usr/share/php/java

Testing,

# php test.php

By default, java is only enabled in the command line php; to enable it in the global instances of php, edit the php.ini file and add the extension.

;; java.ini: Activate the PHP/Java extension

;; zend_extension = "/path/to/java.so"
extension = java.so

;; If you have installed the java-servlet.ini leave this file alone,
;; edit the servlet or standalone ini file.  Otherwise uncomment the
;; following java section and one of the following options:
[java]

There are no other options required. Make sure the java.hosts and java.servlet are disabled. If logging is desired, that’s another story.