Technology Reviews

It’s pretty ironical that Ubuntu doesn’t come with default Java (JRE) installation. Considering the fact that this is almost a mandatory requirement for most of the softwares, it becomes imperative that you have it running on your machine. We’ll see how in easy way we can install JRE on your Ubuntu 8.10 machine.

We’ll be looking at two ways of doing this. One, we’ll install JRE using aptitude and int he second way we’ll see how to install it using the bin file.

Installing using aptitude

1. Make sure multiverse repositories are enabled. To do so all you have to do is go to

System->Administration->Software Sources

2. Make sure the multiverse package is selected.

3. Open the terminal window and type the following command.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
sudo update-alternatives --config java

This should download and install Java RunTime Environment on your machine.

Installing using JRE Bin file

1. Download the latest JRE from here. In my case I have JRE 6.

2. Open a terminal window and type the following changin ? to the version you have downloaded.

chmod +x j??-6-linux-*.bin
sudo ./j??-6-linux-*.bin
sudo cp j??1.6.0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-sun
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-sun/jre/bin/java" 1
sudo update-alternatives --set java /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-sun/jre/bin/java

This should install Java RunTime Environment as well. However, using the earlier method is an easier and foolproof way of doing it.

Once you have installed JRE on your machine you should check if it is correctly installed. You can do so my tying the following and in a terminal window

java -version

and it should return the something like this:

java version "1.6.0_10"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-b33)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode)

Also to check if the java plugin is correctly installed in your Firefox you can check it by typing “about:plugins” and it should look something like this:

I hope that in future version of Ubuntu, Java comes integrated with the operating system to make it easier or if there is a deb package for the same.