Integrating newer or 3rd party JDKs in Debian/Ubuntu

Datum: 05.03.2008 18:59

With the introduction of update-java-alternatives Debian/Ubuntu made it difficult to use manually installed JDKs.

After several attempts to create an appropriate /usr/lib/jvm/.*.jinfo I detected the need to maintain the files in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/ via update-alternatives --install (See this German article on that issue).

Just one deep breath away from developing some tool collection Google gave me the real answer (hint from 0815user as of November 27th, 2006):

There is a package for converting e.g. Sun's jdk*linux*.bin "packages" into Debian package, unfortunately nobody seems to know of it ...

Here is a Mini-How-To for making and installing a .deb package for Sun's JDK (as of 1.6.0_05):

• Download the appropriate JDK package from Sun's J2SE Download page and save it locally, say as ~/downloads/jre-6u5-linux-x64.bin. (Be careful to download the .bin package, not the damn .rpm)
• Install java-package doing   sudo apt-get install java-package
• Due to some renamings and typos it is recommended to download and upgrade to a newer release manually, e.g. download it from Debian testing respectively Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 (prerelease as of now) and upgrade using e.g.:   cd ~/downloads ; dpkg -i java-package_0.39_all.deb
  As this package only consists of shell scripts, there should be no backporting problem like unsatisfied lib* dependencies, and the apt-get install before resolved eventuall unsatisfied package dependencies.
• Eventually you need to make a soft link to satisfy make-jpkg's still incomplete package name parsing, e.g.   ln -s jdk-6u5-linux-x64.bin jdk-6u5-linux-amd64.bin
• As normal user (does not work as root!) create a .deb package:   fakeroot make-jpkg jdk-6u5-linux-amd64.bin
• Install your package:   sudo dpkg -i sun-j2sdk1.6_1.6.0+update5_amd64.deb
• Finally test your update:   java -version
• If you still get some 1.4.2, 1.5, ... you might try to   sudo apt-get remove gcj-4.2-base bsh-gcj ant-optional-gcj ant-gcj j2re1.4
• The only obvious flaw of make-jpkg seems the lack of an according /usr/lib/jvm/*.jinfo file. This might help, if you have sun-java6-bin installed:
  cd /usr/lib/jvm
test -L j2sdk1.6-sun || sudo ln -sv /usr/lib/j2sdk1.6-sun .
sudo cat .java-6-sun.jinfo \
  |sed -e 's/jvm\/java-6-sun/lib\/j2sdk1.6-sun/' \
  |sed -e 's/java-6-sun[0-9\.-]*/j2sdk1.6-sun/' \
  |sed -e 's/63/65/' \
  >.j2sdk1.6-sun.jinfo
sudo chmod 0644 .j2sdk1.6-sun.jinfo
  The 65 kind of stands for 6u5. Now you should be able to   update-java-alternatives --set j2sdk1.6-sun   to set at least the most important alternatives links correctly.

 Hope this helps ...