Running RSSOwl on a free java

[Sven de Marothy]

Hello everyone,
RSSOwl is a nice little RSS-feed reader which uses SWT.
It works nicely with Classpath now. But you need the fix to
java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream which I commited today. 
(but I think it should work from the 0.14 release with that tiny patch,
too)

Obligatory screenshots:
http://www.qc.physto.se/~sven/RSSOwl/

Okay. So I applied that one-line patch and I've got CP and a free VM
installed. How to get it running.. Well, the dead simple way is to get
the binary packages (v1.0.2 was tested) here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=86683&package_id=90094&release_id=306887

1) Unpack it. 
2) Run with your VM of choice. It even runs at a usable speed with
jamvm. Make sure the SWT files are where ld can find it. So, typically:

$ tar xzf rssowl_linux_1_0_2_bin.tar.gz
$ cd rssowl_linux_1_0_2_bin/
$ setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./
$ jamvm -jar rssowl.jar
(although you might want to give it some more memory than the JamVM
default. -mx128M or something)

Okay.. That was painless, no?
How do I build the thing from source in a free environment?

This assumes you have a jar utility, jikes and Apache Ant installed. I'm
still working on a nice native-compiled version with gcj. 
(which shouldn't need the patch to GZIPInputStream, because the gcj
implementation doesn't have this bug)

1) Get the source distribution (duh)
2) Unpack it
3) Modify the build.xml file (in src/)
in the javac section, set the property:
    compiler="jikes" 
(nowarn="yes" optional)

Change the line:

classpath="${libs};${SWT-PI};${SWT-MOZILLA};"

to include our classpath:

classpath="${libs};${SWT-PI};
${SWT-MOZILLA};/usr/local/classpath/share/classpath/glibj.zip"

(default classpath directory, change if you've got glibj.zip somewhere
else)

4) This still won't compile, unfortunately, since there's a nasty
undocumented, Sun-specific stuff in
src/java/net/sourceforge/rssowl/util/shop/URLShop java. 
Fortunately it's not critical, so we just comment it out. (Patch
attached)

5) Follow the build instructions in the README file as usual

6) Run your jar as above.

Left as an excersize for myself: Get the thing compiled to native with
GCJ, and perhaps integrate it with the SWT packages included in FC4 for
an out-of-the-box FC4-compatible RPM.

/Sven

URLShop.patch
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