As I am experimenting (not more than that) with the Scala language, I needed to reinstall that in my Ubuntu 64-bits. The repositories only have version 2.3, whereas version 2.6 is already the final (as in: non-beta) version. Ubuntu is a fine OS, but it’s repositories are far from up-to-date (you need to modify your repositories-list to get Thunderbird 2, the regular repositories only have 1.5!).
So I uninstalled the 2.3 version and downloaded the sources. The Scala wiki has excellent instructions on how to build the binaries, so I decided to give it a go. I tried with Java 5 and with Java 6, and to no surprise the Java 6 version was built faster and ran the tests faster. Considerably faster: the Java 5 version ran all tests in 29 minutes, the Java 6 version in 23 minutes, about 20% faster.
As I just installed Oracle 10g (64 bits Linux version) I will try to do some Scala-Oracle tests. We’ll see.