Sunday, April 30, 2017

Staying up to date

One thing about having several computers, and about never having quite enough time to work on them, is that whenever I turn on a particular computer, it's almost certain that I'll have updates to perform:

  • Windows updates
  • Java updates
  • nVidia driver updates
  • Steam updates
  • etc.

In fact, I'll usually have at least 2 or 3 updates that run whenever I switch one of my computers on.

At least the updates are mostly self-sufficient, though I can never really get the hang of which updates just run automatically, and which require me to baby-sit them at least to the point where they put up a confirmation prompt requesting me to authorize them to update their own software.

Snort.

Meanwhile, in the world of updates, I'm trying to figure out if Windows Subsystem for Linux has matured to the point where I can run Java 8 on it.

As best I can understand from poking around on duh Netz, it seems that:

  • Oracle's Java 8 distribution has made a number of fixes, and now can be successfully installed and run on Windows Subsystem for Linux, at least according to this StackOverflow answer
  • But Java 8 in general really seems to prefer Ubuntu 16 over Ubuntu 14,
  • And Microsoft themselves suggest that both Java 8 and Ubuntu 16 are able to be used once I have upgraded to Windows 10 Creators Update (see this MSDN blog article)

So it seems like the bottom line is that for the time being, I should continue to do my Java work using either the vanilla Windows JDK, or using my full Linux installation on my VirtualBox instance(s).

But hopefully Windows 10 Creators Update will reach my machine soon (if I get really impatient, Microsoft says I can possibly hurry the process along using the Update Assistant).

And then I can start a whole new round of updates!

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