PPC java

since we are using this mac laptop as the dedicated reprap machine, this page will contain some rants about dealing with the ppc peculiarity. first up, java. the ubuntu java page suggests using the IBM jdk. Hint: the package you want to install (after adding the medibuntu repository and key) is ibm-j2sdk1.5.

you also need the following packages (further details may ba found at http://packages.ubuntu.com/)

• libstdc++5 (which is missing from the IBM jdk requirements)
• ant-optional (for javah task)
• libx11-dev (and all its dependencies)
• mesa-common-dev (for glext.h)

the j3d source

• register at https://java3d.dev.java.net/ and follow the instructions for checkingout vecmath, j3d-core and j3d-core-utils.
• run ant in vecmath, then j3d-core directories

used the “Mac OSX/Source package” for RXTX version 2.1. there were numerous compile/configure errors involving a non-existent kernel define UTS_RELEASE. as a quick workaround I commented out these sections of code (which were just checking that the running kernel matched the compiled source).

initially i added the java3d jar files on the classpath with -classpath, but later discovered that the -jar method of launching RepRap defeats this.

ultimately i just copied all of the jar files to the correct places, eg:

sudo mv j3d-org-java3d-all.jar /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-ibm/jre/lib/ext/

sudo cp -v j3d-core/build/linux-ppc/opt/lib/ext/j3dcore.jar /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-ibm/jre/lib/ext
sudo cp -v j3d-core/build/linux-ppc/opt/lib/ext/j3dutils.jar /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-ibm/jre/lib/ext
sudo cp -v vecmath/build/opt/lib/ext/vecmath.jar /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-ibm/jre/lib/ext

sudo cp -v j3d-core/build/linux-ppc/opt/native/ogl/objs/libj3dcore-ogl.so /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-ibm/jre/bin/

and finally, we were getting a lot of errors like:

STLObject(): Exception loading STL file from: file:/home/foam/code/reprap-host-0.8.1/reprap-wv.stl
com.sun.j3d.loaders.IncorrectFormatException: sun.io.MalformedInputException

which was ultimately fixed by running in a non-UTF-8 locale, I did this by editing the reprap-host.sh script to:

#!/bin/bash
LANG=${LANG%%.UTF-8} java -Xmx384m -jar Reprap.jar

the LANG= part is just a smarty-pants way of stripping the .UTF-8 part of your locale.