Category: Mac

Apple Mac in general – not OS-X specific

Compiling Java 7.0 on OS X

Since the announcement by Apple last week about deprecating Java on OS X, there’s been a few people wanting to know how to compile OpenJDK on the Mac.

Although I’ve not done this for JDK 6, this article cover’s how to compile and use the current development version of JDK 7.0 on OS X.

First a few notes:

  1. This only enables Java 7 within an X environment, native UI’s are not supported – one of the main parts of the Apple JVM
  2. When I tested this by running Netbeans 7.0 M2 within X the menus were a bit screwey – try it you’ll see what I mean
  3. These instructions are for 10.5.8 but should work for 10.6.x
  4. This is for Intel processors only

So as a word of warning: Don’t expect this to either work, or work well – and don’t use this in production – JDK7 isn’t due out for another 12 months or so…

Ok, first we need a bootstrap JDK6 environment. This is needed to do some of the initial java compilation during the build. For this the apple JVM can’t be used so we need to download and install the i386 Soylate binaries JDK – don’t get the amd64 version, get the i386 one…

Once you have it downloaded, copy it to /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3 and test it:

sabrina:~ peter$ /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3/bin/java -version
java version "1.6.0_03-p3"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_03-p3-landonf_19_aug_2008_14_55-b00)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 1.6.0_03-p3-landonf_19_aug_2008_14_55-b00, mixed mode)

Next create a blank directory under which we will build everything. I’m using ~/dev/ojdk but you could use any directory. Under this we need to create a couple of directories and some symlinks:

sabrina:~ peter$ mkdir -p dev/ojdk
sabrina:~ peter$ cd dev/ojdk
sabrina:~ peter$ mkdir -p bin ALT_COMPILER_PATH
sabrina:~ peter$ cd ALT_COMPILER_PATH
sabrina:~ peter$ ln -s /usr/bin .SOURCE
sabrina:~ peter$ ln -s .SOURCE/g++-4.0 g++
sabrina:~ peter$ ln -s .SOURCE/gcc-4.0 gcc
sabrina:~ peter$ cd ../bin

Now in the bin directory you need to create two scripts. Fortunately these are readily available from http://gist.github.com/617451 – specifically update.sh and update-usr-local.sh. Copy these two files into the bin directory and ensure they are executable.

Now open update.sh in your favourite editor and find the line with ALT_COMPILER_PATH in it. Change it to hold the full path to the ALT_COMPILER_PATH directory defined above. In my case this looks like:

ALT_COMPILER_PATH=/Users/peter/dev/ojdk/ALT_COMPILER_PATH/ \

Next we need to checkout a copy of the source:

sabrina:~ peter$ cd ~/dev/ojdk
sabrina:~ peter$ hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/bsd-port/bsd-port bsd

We should now be setup. The last step is to run a build. This can be done at any time. It will check for any updates, clear down and then run a full build:

sabrina:~ peter$ cd ~/dev/ojdk/bsd
sabrina:~ peter$ source ../bin/update.sh

If all goes well, after about 20 minutes you should see something like the following at the end of the build:

testing build: ./build/bsd-amd64/j2sdk-image/bin/java -version

openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-peter_2010_10_25_11_19-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.0-b05, mixed mode)

If the build succedes the last step is to install it under /usr/local/java-1.7.0:

sabrina:~ peter$ cd ~/dev/ojdk/bsd
sabrina:~ peter$ source ../bin/update-usr-local.sh

To use Java 7, you need to simply point the app to the installed application, usually by setting JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/java-1.7.0 and running $JAVA_HOME/bin/java…

sabrina:bin peter$ /usr/local/java-1.7.0/bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-peter_2010_10_25_11_19-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.0-b05, mixed mode)

Turn your Mac into a Wifi Base Station

Some people like myself use mobile broadband for their internet connection, either because it’s the only option where they live or like me have had enough of BT (in the UK you usually still need BT for the physical line regardless of the ISP).

Now with the various dongles they work fine on the the local machine and for the local wired network its usually as simple as turning on Internet Sharing (for the 3 network you have to do things differently due to them using a special profile). The problem comes to when you want to share the connection via wifi – but don’t have a wifi router.

On Linux boxes some wifi chipsets support base station mode but things become complicated due to having to configure the card, the firmware etcetera… but what about on a Mac? All recent Mac’s have AirPort cards so can a Mac act as a base station?

To put it simply, yes and it’s supported as standard (I’m using OSX10.5.7). Not only that it can be enabled from a couple of extra clicks.

First open System Preferences and select Sharing:

Next Select (not check) Internet Sharing and make sure AirPort is turned on (I also have Ethernet enabled as well).

Now at this point when you turn on sharing the WiFi connection will be open to anyone – so it’s probably advisable to turn on encryption by Selecting AirPort Options:

That’s all there is to it. You simply turn it on by turning Internet Sharing on and pressing start.

ssh-askpass on OSX 10.5

I’ve been playing with NetBeans 6.7M3 and the latest Mercurial plugin and found that I couldn’t push to a remote repository via ssh. All netbeans would return was:

Mercurial Push
--------------
INFO Pushing To: ssh://pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com/hg/ga4Partner ...
ERROR Command failed:
Command: [/usr/local/bin/hg, outgoing, -v, --template=rev:{rev}\nauth:{author}\ndesc:{desc}\ndate:{date|hgdate}\nid:{node|short}\n\nendCS:\n, --repository, /Users/peter/dev/gameaccount/maven/ga4Partner, ssh://pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com/hg/ga4Partner]
Output: [running ssh pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com “hg -R hg/ga4Partner serve --stdio”, remote: ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory, remote: Host key verification failed., abort: no suitable response from remote hg!]
INFO: End of Mercurial Push

Here the remote server is trying to prompt for the login password but fails because OSX 10.5 does not have the ssk-askpass command.

After some searching on the net (ok Google who else) I found Mercurial Push from IntelliJ where someone had a similar position with IntelliJ. By creating the following script mercurial in NB6.7M3 works flawlessly:

sabrina:~ peter$ sudo vi /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass
#! /bin/sh  
  
#  
# An SSH_ASKPASS command for MacOS X  
#  
# Author: Joseph Mocker, Sun Microsystems  
  
#  
# To use this script:  
#     setenv SSH_ASKPASS "macos-askpass"  
#     setenv DISPLAY ":0"  
#  
  
TITLE=${MACOS_ASKPASS_TITLE:-"SSH"}  
  
DIALOG="display dialog \"$@\" default answer \"\" with title \"$TITLE\""  
DIALOG="$DIALOG with icon caution with hidden answer"  
  
result=`osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"' -e "activate"  -e "$DIALOG" -e 'end tell'`  
  
if [ "$result" = "" ]; then  
    exit 1  
else  
    echo "$result" | sed -e 's/^text returned://' -e 's/, button returned:.*$//'  
    exit 0  
fi  

sabrina:~ peter$ sudo chmod +x /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass
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