Most of Fenfire has been written as a Java application to achieve platform independency. To use Fenfire software, you need a sufficiently advanced Java runtime. At the moment, Sun's JRE 1.4 or the latest Kaffe are enough. To compile Fenfire from source code, Sun's JDK 1.4 or latest Jikes are enough.
The development versions of Fenfire use java from system PATH by default, but you can change this by setting variable JAVA in the environment or by adding the setting to make commands.
Kaffe is a good implementation of Java as Free Software. If it's not installed as java, you can give command export JAVA=kaffe.
If you run Debian, you can install Kaffe with
apt-get install kaffe
When you try to find out what's going on or want to report a problem to us, see the version of the runtime you are using by
java -fullversion
or if you have set JAVA
$JAVA -fullversion
The build system of Fenfire uses javac from system PATH by default. To use another compiler or set options, define variable JAVAC in the environment or in the make command lines.
The Java compiler that comes with Kaffe doesn't understand all our code, but the best compiler called Jikes does and is also Free Software. If you have Debian, installation can be done with
apt-get install jikes
To use Jikes as the compiler, give command
export JAVAC="jikes +Z0"
In addition, Jikes needs to know where the basic Java library is found. For Debian and Kaffe this is /usr/share/kaffe-common/lib/rt.jar so give command
export BOOTCLASSPATH=/usr/share/kaffe-common/lib/rt.jar
But on Debian, there is an even better way to use Jikes with Kaffe. You can install a package called jikes-kaffe, which takes care of the Java library when you set the Java compiler as
export JAVAC="jikes-kaffe +Z0"