Replacing OpenJDK with JRE 6 in Arch Linux

In Arch Linux Wiki page, it mentioned that OpenJDK is nearly perfect which we need not to install Oracle proprietary Java. But sadly to know, there are some Java applet which needs Java Runtime Environment version 6 instead of 7. That means, neither OpenJDK nor Oracle proprietary Java 7 works.

Therefore, I need to replace the jdk7-openjdk, jre7-openjdk, and jre7-openjdk-headless with AUR jre6 and jdk6. Besides that, icedtea-web-java7 is also no needed.

However, in Arch Linux, if doing replacement, that means we need to remove the unwanted packages. Removing the packages, because of the dependencies, all the other packages depend on them will also need to be removed. Yet, this problem can be solved with some tricks in pacman,

sudo pacman -Rndd jdk7-openjdk jre7-openjdk jre7-openjdk-headless icedtea-web-java7 java-rhino
#Use -dd to ignore dependencies check

As a result, only those packages will be removed. The other packages depend on them will not be removed, such as jedit. By this, we can install the jre6 and jdk6 after that.

Besides that, we can check whether missing dependencies with “testdb” command from pkgtools package. It will be helpful if we remove some of the packages without dependencies check.

Now, the Java applet is working.

GIMP does not support CMYK PSD file, then how?

I downloaded some PSD files, which is a file format by Photoshop. I tried to open it with GIMP, can be known as most popular open source image editor. However, opening the file showed some error message,

Error loading PSD file: Unsupported color mode: CMYK

Then I tried to install the “gimp-plugin-separate”, but it does not work. According to this post, the author also mentioned that “gimp-plugin-separate” does not work. But, the author mentioned some solutions. One of the solution is using “imagemagick” to convert the file into several PNG files.

However, I prefer to preserve the layers of the PSD file so that I can edit the image easier in GIMP. Therefore, my solution is to convert the file into the TIFF image.

convert input.psd -channel rgba -alpha set -colorspace rgb output.tif

But, the vector information of the images will be lost if converted to non PSD file format.