Installing JDK on old Linux

Question

This is either a FAQ or a genuine Interesting Topic; I would be grateful for help in
either case.
I'm running Red Hat 5.2 on my laptop. Upgrading to 6.x or 7.1 is going to be tough,
because I've got a bunch of stuff that I use (like VMWare!), that's installed itself in
the root filesystem, and Red Hat's "upgrade" option in its distribution disks seems to
be a bit of a joke.
I've got a copy of Sun's binary distribution, but it requires newer libraries than my
box has. I've got Sun's source distribution, but that seems to be confused about
some #defines in src/solaris/hpi (or something like that), and is not compiling. I have
a copy of Blackdown's 1.2 binaries for glibc 2.0, and they seem to run at least, but
when I run a GUI-based program they do not display any text! Right now, persuading
the Sun source distribution to compile seems to be my best bet, but it's slow going.
Can anyone help me with this?
Thanks in advance.
Sergej Roytman

Answer 1

Simple ;-):
1.) Install a new glibc (maybe even by hand, but be careful not to shoot your system)
2.) Use KAFFE. It's a JVM that doesn't require a special glibc I think. Unfortunately it is only a Java 1 JVM.
-- Stephan