On 10/09/2010 04:33 AM, Milos Blazevic wrote: > Bob Stine wrote: > >> Milos Blazivec wrote: >> >> /... I am, in fact, interested in making adjustments to the Wiki / >> /page - but sadly not the ones you proposed Bob, since the just >> won't do / >> /the trick./ >> >> >> Hmm. I ran the executed the bin file, edited /etc/profile so that >> PATH included the "bin" directory of the sun jdk directory, added >> environment variable JDK_HOME, deleted the /usr/bin/java symlink from >> java -> /etc/alternative/java, and everything works, or at least well >> enough for me to run the Eclipse C++ IDE, which was my goal. >> >> Maybe adding the jdk was unnecessary for Eclipse to work? >> >> Could you unpack "just won't do", or point to a discussion of the issue? >> >> > What I meant is that the instructions you suggested in your first e-mail > are taken from: > http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/install-linux-64-rpm-138254.html > and are all but comprehenssive, let alone appropriate for beginners. > These installation instructions have been accompanying Sun Java as long > as I can remember, and "strangely", no one cared to mention 'em in the > Wiki page... don't you think that's kinda odd? I don't - 'cause they > don't work! > > This second part (editing /etc/profiles, deleting symlinks and editing > PATH...) is NOT what you mentioned in your first e-mail. However, in my > honest oppinion, this is still not the correct way to do this. > > What you did, is that you probably got it to work for Your particular > purpose by resorting to an unconventional method (i.e. circumvent the > mechanism intended for this purpose, rather than a by-the-book > approach). By solving the problem this way, sooner or later you'll end > up breaking something. Maintainance may prove difficult later > > For me, by-the-book is using "alternatives" utility for this purpose - > intended by the makers way to handle this kind of issues. (switching > between different mail servers, etc.) > Using alternatives in the context of Java is 100% useless for ordinary users who do not want to use the stock gcj or openjdk packages ( and therefore replace them with Sun's packages). As far as I have seen on the few hundreds workstations that I maintain + the requests in the IRC channel, users only need to run - browser java plugin ( solved by installing Sun's jre + a convenient ln -s already mentioned before in this thread - java ( the binary, as in " java -Xmx400m -DuseDesktop=true -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false -jar /usr/share/jalbum/JAlbum.jar ") in order to run .jar applications - the libs needed by Eclipse, also mentioned before in the thread > Better idea is to adjust symlink to point to the desired binary, rather > than editing PATH variable, deleting the symlink,... > At least the jre package (and I am almost sure jdk too) from Sun comes with the following structure: lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Apr 10 01:25 default -> /usr/java/latest drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jun 28 23:34 jre1.6.0_20 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Jun 28 23:35 latest -> /usr/java/jre1.6.0_20 Using /usr/java/latest and / or /usr/java/default in your scripts makes them immune to upgrades, as long as you stick with Sun's packages ( which - sad but true - make the java-openjdk / gcj packages useless and offer ( for the moment ) better compatibility with the real world. At least from I where I stand.