problems with freetype.dll, jdk 8 and windows

[Hendrik Schreiber]

Hey there,

I’m trying to build a 32 bit JDK8u with Windows. And hoorray! it’s building just fine.
But when running some software I run into:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: C:\…\jre\bin\freetype.dll: %1 is not a valid Win32 application

Apparently, I am not the first one with this problem. http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/build-dev/2015-January/014091.html seems to have faced the same issue and was told:


“Freetype on Windows has long been a frustrating source of problems.

In JDK9 there is a new configure option, --with-freetype-src, which 
helps out a lot with the problematic freetype on Windows. It just 
requires you to download the freetype source code and it will 
automatically compile a correct freetype library for use by OpenJDK.

AFAIK this patch has not been backported to JDK8, however. But if you 
can switch to JDK9 I highly recommend  it. An alternative solution might 
be to download JDK9 just to use this feature, and then point to the 
newly built freetype library using configure in JDK8.”


I can definitely confirm that first statement…

Is there any other, easy recommended way how to deal with this on for 8u. I’d like to avoid having to deal at all with JDK9 at this point. Perhaps someone has a correctly built 32 bit dll lying around...?

BTW—Something that puzzles me but probably has a straight forward explanation: Why is there no freetype.dll in the pre-built JDKs (either 8 or 9)? Shouldn’t that be in there somewhere? I was thinking that would be a great source for a correctly built binary lib..

Thanks!

-hendrik