After finishing my hiking-emergency-alert project I wanted to drive that application on my old Samsung NC10 Netbook. That was my energy-saving plan for the 2026 hiking summer, because this mail-application has to run all day while you are out hiking. Netbooks are cheap and small computers with low energy consumption. Mine has a 32-bit processor (CPU) and a 1024 x 600 pixel screen, running on Lubuntu LINUX. On LINUX, you can find out your processor and operating-system by launching these command-lines:
$ lscpu | grep op-mode CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit $ uname -a LINUX ..... 4.4.0-145-generic #171-Ubuntu .... 2019 .... i686 GNU/Linux
I haven't used my Netbook since 7 years when I last upgraded its operating system to 4.4.0. Less and less providers still support the 32-bit platform. Launching the Firefox web-browser I found out that web-pages do not work properly, even after I upgraded Firefox to "Quantum" 66.0.3 (last available version for 32-bit?). So I could not even download my JAR file from github, because the github "<> Code" button did not do anything, no dropdown, no reaction to mouse-click, it wasn't even green. I turned to wget, but this downloaded an HTML file, I had to find out what the "raw" URL for my JAR file is. After all I could download it via
$ wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/fritzthecap/hiking-emergency-alert/raw/refs/heads/main/hiking-emergency-alert.jar
Now I launched that Swing application via
$ java -jar hiking-emergency-alert.jar
with the installed very old Java 1.7, which of course gave me a class-version error, because the downloaded JAR had been compiled with Java 21:
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: .... Unsupported major.minor version 61.0
I searched for the newest Java supporting 32-bit platforms for a long time on the web. Neither ORACLE nor the backing OpenJDK do support 32-bit anymore since Java 1.8. But there are still people out there that believe in the Java promise "Write once, run everywhere". From Bellsoft you can download "Liberica" Java 17 and even Java 21 for 32-bit platforms:
As the download link in Firefox again did not work, I did it with wget:
$ wget --no-check-certificate https://download.bell-sw.com/java/17.0.18+10/bellsoft-jdk17.0.18+10-linux-i586.tar.gz
I unpacked the downloaded .tar.gz archive and, without setting PATH, tried to launch
jdk-17.0.18/bin/java -jar hiking-emergency-alert.jar
And you know what? It worked!
The Java promise "Write once runeverywhere" has crumbled over time. It began when Apple disabled Java virtual-machines 2011 in their web-browser due to security concerns. Next JavaFX did not actually cover the promised mobile platform. With the adoption of Java by ORACLE, the JDK got more and more complex, and the myriads of open-source libraries provided by Maven repositories got big compatibility problems. Dynamic class loading took its toll. Java followers like Spring ("Java for superheroes") employ developers just for finding out version numbers of libraries that are compatible with each other.
But it's not only the poor documentation and reckless software progress that makes our computer-lifes expensive and time-consuming. Also the browsers are aging fast, and so do the operating-systems and the hardware. Not even Debian LINUX supports 32-bit any more. That's the way all things are going in this Universe: sooner or later they fall apart. Hopefully not poisoning our oceans and soils with precious rare earths.
