Sun-supported operating systems, and build systems, for JDK 7

[Mark Reinhold]

Back in December we aborted an attempt to switch to Fedora 9 as the
standard JDK 7 Linux build OS here at Sun.

FYI, after some further market research we've decided that Sun will
officially support JDK 7 on RHEL 5.0 or later and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or
later.  Binaries built on F9 appear to run fine on those (and later)
releases, so Fedora 9 will in fact be Sun's standard Linux build OS.

Sun will support JDK 7 on Solaris 10 (FCS) and later and, of course,
on OpenSolaris (exact version TBD).  The build OS for these will be
Solaris 10 FCS.

We're still working out the details of which Windows releases will be
supported and what the build OS will be, but it's highly likely that
we'll support the upcoming Windows 7 release.

Sun engineers will focus their efforts on supporting these particular
OS releases, but patches to support other releases or other distros,
or even other operating systems or architectures, will be welcome.

(Thanks to Xiomara Jayasena, Kelly O'Hair, Phil Race, and Ekaterina
 Pavlova for digging into these issues.)

- Mark