[PLUG] Java on Ubuntu 10.04

Richard C. Steffens rsteff at comcast.net
Fri Aug 10 22:59:48 UTC 2012


Which version of Java should I be trying to use?

It's been said here on several occasions, "The great thing about 
standards is that there are so many to chose from." I seem to be 
floundering in a small sea of them.

I've discovered that at some point, probably one of the last Firefox 
upgrades, that I no longer have Java support in Firefox. I want to 
upload a photo to Costco's photo web site, which I successfully did back 
in December, 2011, and found that the uploader didn't work. The 
recommendation was to go get the current version of Java.

After spending some time looking at 
http://java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp?locale=en I finally found a 
link to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java which tells me that 
"Oracle (Sun) Java 6 is no longer available to be distributed by Ubuntu, 
because of license issues." As I look in Synaptic I see that Sun Java 6 
is what I have. I also see on the above mentioned Ubuntu help page that 
I can download and install Oracle Java 7, but that there are no .deb 
packages available. I can install the JRE from a script or the entire 
Java development version from the command line, and that there are 
instructions that I can follow.

My main concern is that LibreOffice continues to run after going through 
all the uninstall and install steps. That's one reason why I have Ubuntu 
10.04 installed on both my laptop and my desktop. This lets me test an 
install on the laptop before committing to it on the desktop. While not 
perfect it seems to work reasonably well. So, I started by completely 
removing Sun Java 6, using Synaptic. Selecting that also selected 
LibreOffice. I went ahead and uninstalled. After finishing, LibreOffice 
still works. Also, after rebooting, LibreOffice still works. I don't 
know what that implies.

I looked at the LibreOffice site and saw that it is happy with OpenJDK. 
On the OpenJDK site I saw that I can install openjdk-7-jre with apt-get. 
But, when I try running

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

I get an error message that says, "Package openjdk-7-jre is not 
available, bit is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source.
E: Package openjdk-7-jre has no installation candidate"

I also note that on the OpenJDK site there are also JDK 6 and JDK 8 
versions. JDK 8 appears to be very much in a development state. And on 
openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk6/ there is a chart under the heading 
"Genealogy" that only adds to my confusion.

I also find openjdk-6-jre in Synaptic, but there are three different 
versions, openjdk-6-jre-headless, openjdk-6-jre and openjdk-6-jre-zero. 
The first two use Hotspot JIT and the  second uses Zero/Shark.

So, I'm confused. How do I decide which version to use?

TIA for any recommendations.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens




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