Installing Java on Debian
GCJ, the GNU compiler with java extensions, does a great job at compiling Java into bytecode, but still has some bugs in its libraries when dealing with Swing components. Installing Sun’s Java packages on Debian thus is occasionally necessary, and has historically been a chore. I won’t list the process here to even show my distaste for it - it just wasn’t very fun.
Things are much easier now, though. Just make sure a non-free package repository is listed in your sources.list, and things become magic:
sudo echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
(Note that if you aren’t using lenny, you should change that. Also, feel free to choose a different mirror.)
Now update your package repository:
sudo apt-get update
And finally install whichever Sun Java packages you want!
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
Cheers to Matthias Klose (Ubuntu), Juergen Kreileder (Blackdown), Barry Hawkins, Jeroen van Wolffelaar, and the other folks behind debian-java for adding these packages to Debian’s repositories. It is another push that greatly enhances the usability of the project for both developers and users alike.
