Ok - since the days of Alan Turing mass storage has
become unbelievably cheap. Still there is no sense to waste it:
By chance I discovered to the Arduino standard installation (ver. 22)
has the full java runtime environment under its hood.
Since I have the Java SDK installed I was wondering what happened if
I deleted the whole arduino/java directory. Guess what? Nothing. Works like
charm! Even with Java 7.
The same applies for Processing. The full Java RT is installed. If you
delete both you save 2x110 MB of disk space.
So here is my suggestion for Arduino 23: Please check during installation
if java is already installed.
Is it too hard to delete the unused folder after uncompressing the archive? But maybe this 'skill' has already been lost. Apple's 'iWhatever' products are so damn good at mentally incapacitating the users. If you feel offended, it is time to do something about that.
For instance, my Mac Arduino install does NOT include a java directory. Anywhere.
The Resources/Java directory, which you might expect to be equivalent, isn't. It contains all the mac specific executables (C compiler, avrdude, etc) as well as the Arduino "core" code.
westfw:
For instance, my Mac Arduino install does NOT include a java directory.
Well - I can't say anything about different platforms. I just tried Arduino on Windows.
Triggered by the first reply I was thinking about the real problem with this version
of Arduino. Here Arduino's installation is something in between: Not a real 'full'
installation and not real 'do-it-yourself'.
In the first case an installer would check what you have on your machine, copy
the files needed and set all appropriate parameters.
In the second case the user has to do the job all by himself - copy what needs to
be copied, set what needs to be set.
Arduino (Processing to be precise) for windows gives you an archive that you
have to move yourself. During first startup it generates the settings file and
it's your job to alter it if you need a different setting (i.e. a wider ide screen by default).
I suggest to remove the Java RT package from this archive. That saves disk space
on server and local machine and it saves bandwidth. A user that can
install arduino has most likely Java installed or can it do himself.
In the next release (ver. 23) a check for the presence of Java (and the respective
error message) would be nice...
The Linux version includes pretty much nothing extra, no JRE, not even the avr-gcc toolchain. It's a tiny download (at least relative to Windows and Mac), but the downside is all sorts of compatibility issues that change in subtle ways over the years.
Just because everything seems to work fine if you delete the bundled JRE on your own machine doesn't necessarily mean it will always be so for everybody, across many versions of Windows and Java spanning 10 years, both now and especially into the future as Microsoft and Oracle change their platforms.
