Before there was OpenJDK, Linux distributions often lacked Java support at all or provided gcj as a very unpleasant alternative. A project that aimed at this issue was jpackage, who provided Source-RPMS to put Sun´s java downloads into sane RPMs. Unfortunately they do not seem to provide support for current versions of Sun´s java, now [...]

Recently I set up a CentOS based mysql server (Actually I used RPMs from mysql.com since the ones that come with CentOS 5.4 contain some ugly replication bugs). I overlooked, that the default storage engine was MyISAM while our corporate standard (and applications requirement) is InnoDB.