Visual proof:



Booting GlassFish v2.1.1 takes almost 10 minutes on my Linux-powered Nokia N900 smartphone, but that's not too bad considering it takes around 15 seconds on my 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Phenom-II machine. I haven't tried doing anything serious yet on the phone, and I don't know if I will spend any more effort on this. The only point of this exercise was to demonstrate the following three things:

• The amazing computing power of today's smartphones
• The manifest superiority of the Linux operating system over all proprietary operating systems
• Payoff for the promise made by Java: "compile once, run anywhere"

Technical details:

Since Nokia N900 doesn't yet come with any "official" Java engine, I had to install a third-party Java. I just followed the instructions here to install OpenJDK. Many thanks to the Linux and GNU communities, and to Sun/Oracle, for providing all this software for free. Without free software we would all be stuck in the 1970s...

Installing GlassFish v2.1.1 directly from the jar file didn't work, I got some strange "No space left on device" error, despite having lots of space. So I did a fresh run of the installer on another Linux computer and then copied everything to the N900 system before doing the "setup.xml" and "start-domain" steps. Later on I realized that the v2.1.1 installer tries to start a Swing application in order to present the Sun License. Perhaps that's why it didn't work, because the Cambridge Software Labs OpenJDK for N900 doesn't support Swing. Anyway, running the installer on another machine and then copying the files to the N900 worked perfectly fine.