Okay, now I feel good. I’ve got VMWare installed with Windows XP as the guest OS. That means Office and who knows how many other apps are readily accessible for me. REBOL , for starters. It’s supposed to be cross-platform, but REBOL is happiest by far under Windows.

Incidental anecdotal comment: Windows XP running with 512 MB of RAM in a virtual machine is still significantly snappier than a “real” install of Vista and 2 GB of RAM. And I had turned most of the Vista eye candy off before getting fed up and installing Fedora.

I decided to install the Sun JDK on my new Fedora Linux install today to play with Java. Tried downloading the JDK/NetBeans self-installing bundle. It didn’t work. I got an error in xcb_xlib:xcb_xlib_unlock - something about a failed assertion. While running the installer. Drat.

Installation required skipping the Netbeans IDE and just using the self-extracting JDK archive. Then, in order to get Swing to work, I had to remove Xinerama references from any copy of libmawt.so that was in my Java install. There’s a sed script floating out there, but that wasn’t working for me. Before I spent effort figuring out sed, I edited the files from vim.

    $ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so
$ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/motif21/libmawt.so
$ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/headless/libmawt.so
  

    :%s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXT/g