Cooking With Technology

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.

Shuttleworth Gives a Nod to Debian

As is plastered all over the Internet, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron was recently released for the public to feast upon. I really don’t care about the release itself, but I *do* care about Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post regarding the release. Specifically:

We all owe a great deal to the team who make Debian’s “unstable” repository possible, and of course to the upstream projects from GNOME and KDE through to the Linux kernel.

Read the rest of it here.

I think Mark’s statement shows maturity in the Ubuntu project, and I respect him for showing the open source community some love.

I’m not affiliated with the Debian project in any official capacity (yet!), but I’m happy they are getting the credit they deserve. Kudos to the Debian team and every package maintainer - you don’t hear it enough, but there is a large percentage of the technically aware population that appreciates the work you do beyond measure.