sun java

Java on Debian tip

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | java, linux | No Comments

The default Java environment installed by Debian is the GNU Compiler for Java, while GNU have made remarkable progress with this – anyone doing mainstream Java development will probably prefer to install the latest Sun Java environment on their system – even free software projects like Hadoop are primarily tested in this environment.

Most Linux distributions provide packages for Sun’s Java as well as GCJ and probably OpenJDK. When you install more than one package which provides similarly named commands, Debian’s Alternatives System comes into play – allowing you to select one command or another. When you install a different Java, you can of course manually update each Java command (java, javac, javadoc, jconsole, jmap,jps and so on) using the update-alternatives command, but if you want a quicker way, try the update-java-alternatives command from the java-common package.  It will automatically update the paths to all provided Java commands in one go once you tell it which installed Java environment you wish to use, for example,

update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

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