Cool stuff for Linuxers: JPackage Project, RPM packages of loads of java applications and libraries. I’ve always missed such a site.
That’s a pretty sweet idea, and it looks like there are tons of java projects prebuilt or in source RPM form. Most of my recent Jakarta-related installations have been from the binary tgz, which is simple enough, but having good fairly current stuff in RPM form should lower the threshold for others. Of course, this doesn’t solve your classpath huntdown problems for you, nor does it allow you to experiment with bleeding-edge stuff (that depends on other bleeding-edge stuff), but it’s a great start.
I have also been dissapointed with how stale the freebsd/netbsd/openbsd ‘ports’ of many of the Jakarta projects are. I wanted to use a *bsd for Tomcat 4.x testbed a few months ago, but unfortunately Tomcat 3.x was the latest ‘port.’ I know that this means that I should get off my butt and modernize a few programs for a particular *bsd, but that pesky time thing keeps smacking me down.