On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Calvin Austin wrote:

> In moving forward I would be very interested in areas that
> you believe Blackdown and Sun should focus on, in particular
> what do you plan to use the linux port for, whether its as
> a development machine or rolling out into production. What
> would help you become more productive. Which bugs, like
> the international keyboard bug are causing problems for you.

I use Linux as my development platform for a cross-platform GUI.
The GUI itself is aimed at Linux, Solaris, and Windows platforms
(in that order.)

I'm also active on Borland's newsgroups.  The most common issues
I see new Linux users asking for help with there is (in no particular
order):

  Incompatible window managers
    Java apps misbehave on FVWM2 and others.  Apparently there are
    KDE support hacks hardwired into the JVM?  One common problem
    involves window positioning and size errors.  (General X11 apps
    don't care which window manager they run under.  Why must Java?)

  Fonts
    Nearly every new linux user posts for help with the symbol* 
    font errors.  Many complaints about the fonts being ugly.  (Something
    to do with scaling/aliasing?)  There also appear questions about
    installing asian Fonts, apparently this isn't documented clearly.
    XFree has TrueType support now, but the JVM doesn't use it? 

  Distribution compatibility
    Lots of users post asking for help running the JVM on Suse,
    Caldera, and Slackware.  (It's amazing how many people don't even
    check the READMEs or release notes for platform requirements!)

  Keymappings
    Document how these are setup on linux.  The delete and escape
    keys not working properly come up a lot on Sun's 1.3.

  Printing
    Lots of questions about why Linux printing support is missing or
    only half-implemented.  (I've only used Linux so I don't know if
    these are valid complaints or not.  I do know JBuilder 3.0 didn't
    have *any* Linux printing capability and apps developed on windows
    couldn't print, either.)  This may be much better under 1.3.

  SMP
    Developers wishing to run on SMP machines post often, also.  Sun's
    1.3 readme is unclear on this...  (The 1.3 beta README didn't contain
    the line about SMP kernels not being supported, the 1.3RC did have
    the line but without the 'not'!)  This is confusing people.

-- 
Joi Ellis                    Software Engineer
Aravox Technologies          [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]

No matter what we think of Linux versus FreeBSD, etc., the one thing I
really like about Linux is that it has Microsoft worried.  Anything
that kicks a monopoly in the pants has got to be good for something.
           - Chris Johnson


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