Sun Java SE JRE/JDK 1.6.0 Update 12 Available for Itanium (IA64)

Sun have just released Update 12 of the 1.6.0 Java SE JRE and JDK for Linux and Windows Itanium (IA64) platforms.

The installation packages can be downloaded from the main Update 12 download page here.

It installs and runs successfully on the Debian 5.0 IA64 port.

Netbeans 6.5 on Itanium (IA64) Debian 5.0

Netbeans 6.5 installs and runs successfully on a Debian 5.0 Itanium distribution.

Debian 5.0 on Itanium IA64

Debian 5.0 was released on February 14th, 2009. I believe it represents the state-of-the-art linux distribution that supports machines based around the Itanium processor family. Other distros including SuSE, Red Hat and Fedora are at least one major release behind with an IA64 based port.

I installed Debian 5.0 on my HP ZX6000 workstation which has two 1.3 GHz Madison-class Itanium 2 processors, an Ultra SCSI 320 storage backbone and 16GB of RAM. The installation was via a DVD image downloaded by Bittorrent (took about 7 hours to download the complete image). The installation was painless, and even initially could be driven via a serial terminal connected to the console port.

I have tested the distribution for two days and so far it has been flawless. It works out-of-the-box with both an ATI 7500 PCI video card and the originally supplied ATI Fire GL AGP graphics card.

Well done DEBIAN! Please keep up the good work...

msw@zx6000:~$ uname -a
Linux zx6000 2.6.26-1-mckinley #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 19:19:15 UTC 2009 ia64 GNU/Linux

Sun Releases Java 6 JDK on Itanium

25th February 2009

After an announcement earlier last year that Sun and HP had teamed together to produce a fresh version of the SUN Java JRE & JDK, and a somewhat longer than predicted wait, a version is finally available.

The release notes are here. It can be downloaded by following the Java 6 Update 11 download link.

The latest version is Java 6 Update 11, although information on the Sun website indicates that an Update 12 version will be available shortly.

I downloaded the JDK and installed it on my recent Debian 5.0 installation, which is running on a HP ZX6000 2 x 1.3 Ghz Madison based box.



The JDK appears to be working correctly, and has been used to run various test programs, culminating in Netbeans 6.5 (see separate post).

Well done HP and SUN!