Today I pushed fresh Slackware packages (for 15.0 and -current, and 32bit as well as 64bit) for various new OpenJDK releases. This is a quarterly process where the Java developers release a “GA” version. The “GA” stands for General Availability. The “GA” version indicates that the software is considered stable, feature-complete, and ready for use in production environments. It also marks the release of a new Icedtea framework which is still used to produce the openjdk and openjre (OpenJDK 8) package for Slackware. These are the JDK releases that I grab, compile and package for Slackware.

  • openjdk: updated to 8u492_b09, using the icedtea-3.39.0 framework.
    Note that for OpenJDK 8, you need to install either the JDK or the JRE, not both (the JDK package contains the JRE).
  • openjdk11: updated to 11.0.31_11.
  • openjdk17: updated to 17.0.19_10.
  • openjdk21: updated to 21.0.11_10.
  • openjdk25: updated to 25.0.3_9.
    The 32bit openjdk25 package contains the Zero JVM (which is not optimized for the architecture, because it contains zero assembly) thus this Java will be very slow. This is because other JVM’s are no longer supported on 32bit, starting with OpenJDK 25.

Get the packages from my server: http://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/ or one of the main mirrors. In the US  that is my own http://us.slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/ and in the UK it’s Tadgy’s server at https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/ .

My advice has always been to: only install one version of Java!
However I need to make a footnote here. With OpenJDK 25 I made a fundamental change to the packaging process, The library files are installed into /usr/lib{,64}/jdk25 instead of the path /usr/lib{,64}/java that I have been using historically.
What this means is that starting with OpenJDK 25 packages, you can co-install multiple versions of the JDK. The /usr/lib{,64}/java is no longer a directory but a symlink and you can make it point to the OpenJDK version of your choice.

Let me know if I need to make the same change to future packages of OpenJDK 8 through 21.

Have fun! Eric