The problem: gcj+Classpath fails to work with Xerces2, but Sun's Java does work. The means that, on Fedora, Ant doesn't run with the latest Classpath. gnu/xml/dom/DomDocumentBuilderFactory.java.newDocumentBuilder() does this: setParameter(config, "expand-entity-references", isExpandEntityReferences() ? Boolean.TRUE : Boolean.FALSE); but according to the specification of org.w3c.dom.DOMConfiguration, "expand-entity-references" is not a parameter defined in the DOM. It seems to be local to gnu.xml.dom.ls.DomLSParser. [ http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/org/w3c/dom/DOMConfiguration.html ] This is all well and good with gnu.xml.dom.ls.DomLSParser, but if we have Xerces2 installed in our path then we will fail, because Xerces2 does not support "expand-entity-references". Is it the case that gnu.xml.dom.DomDocumentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder is totally incompatible with Xerces2? The odd thing is that, as I said before, Sun's javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory will work with Xerces2. Thanks, Andrew.