IcedTea packages are now available for CentOS 5/i386. IcedTea builds upon OpenJDK, and replaces the few binary plugs with stubs or classpath code. OpenJDK is the open source Java JDK that Sun Microsystems generously donated to the free software community.

Currently, not all Java software included in CentOS runs with IcedTea (most notably, Eclipse, but the latest version from the Eclipse Foundation works well after setting the language level to 5.0/1.5.0). But for many applications it seems to work well and fast.