I didn’t had any problems with installing Java on Ubuntu.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76702 for those who wants to do so.
That is the thread of instructions that I followed before. They don’t work. I’m not saying they didn’t work for you, but there is obviously a dependancy that is not mentioned in the thread that you had already satisfied.
Actually itys VERY smooth under SUSE if you add the extra update repositories as the website recommends and then do an update.
There is an issue I guess that the license doesnt make it easy for them to redistribute Java (at least for free) so they need to do the install from the Sun online presance. Having said that, the SUSE install solution works pretty well.
Say, I didn’t followed these instructions, but I thought they were working.
It was quite a while ago now but I don’t seem to remember insalling the latest java to me too much trouble on Ubuntu when I was did it… I just searched the froums and chose the most uptodate set of instructions I could find. And believe me me I am far from a linuc nerd. Theer do seem to be a number of differnt ways to do it. Soem bettter/easier than others though.
Oh well each to their own I suppose.
Although all that said, my dream is to own a mac 
Dan.
[quote]I have seen NO Linux distro that installs Sun Java as smoothly as Windows or Mac.
[/quote]
Java works great with Archlinux. Just type
$ pacman -S j2sdk
or
$ pacman -S j2re
And there you are… It’s all I did and I can play cas’ games through javawebstart without any problem.
Last time I checked Ubuntu, Java worked almost out-of-the-box, just need to replace gcc… Aptitude should be able to do it manually. Oh, wait, aptitude is not so great 
[quote]When you later uninstall mysql, it will automatically un-install precisely those of the libraries that were only in use by MySQL
[/quote]
I use Debian on my server (and used it before on my main desktop computer), I don’t remember aptitude being capable of this. Aptitude can’t recursively remove unused dependencies. Correct me if I’m wrong.
the problem with Linux is, that all distros do stuff differntly, even if it’s the same OS. So writing an out-of-the-Box installer, where you only have to click ‘Ok’ and ‘Next’ is probably not that easy, especially if it should create Links at all the important places the distro is keeping for installed programs.
Even windows builds custom kernels during the install process, and occasionally requires the user to rebuild it - for instance if you upgrade your mobo. Although, its carefully wrapped up in other language and 99% of the choices are automatically done instead of being rpesented to the user as questions, as in menuconfig.
* blahblahblahh points upwards to his previous post
it is NOT POSSIBLE to screw up your install using pacakges on debian based distros, and as part of that it is generally difficult if not impossible for user-installed “random-crap” (from a package-based OS’s perspective, anything not in a package is dangerous, bad, and evil) to break currently installed packages.
If you just installed java as a .deb package, it would work. What you tried to do was partially break an existing package by downloading and copying onto your hard disk (NB: not “installing”) “random crap” that comes with no uninstaller. NB: I’m not criticising you here, just putting it into perspective. What I see most frustrating for newcomers to debian is that fundamental issues like this one are NOT EXPLAINED during the initial install - it would save so much pain if they were! Likewise, newcomers should NEVER be told to use the abominable apt-get, when debian comes with a program with a decent (not excellent) UI - aptitude.
This would presumably be the script I referred to earlier, which used to work perfectly for java 1.1.x up to 1.4.x, but then broke on sun’s 1.5.x. They really really need to fix it :(.[quote]
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Hey, arne you’re kidding man… Just take a look at : http://www.autopackage.org/. These men did great work, really… If I had to compile my game with GCJ and distribute it under Linux, I would autopackage it… seems really great !
I use Debian on my server (and used it before on my main desktop computer), I don’t remember aptitude being capable of this. Aptitude can’t recursively remove unused dependencies. Correct me if I’m wrong.
[/quote]
Um. This is a major part of the core design of aptitude et al - recursively removing unused dependencies is partly why they exist in the first place :).
So, yes, it definitely does do that :D.
So this is strange. If I do :
$ apt-get install irssi-text
It installs :
irssi-text libperl5.8
Removing irssi-text :
$ apt-get --purge remove irssi-text
Removes :
irssi-text*
And libperl5.8 is still installed… Or maybe there’s a command I don’t know… I had to use deborphan to remove those useless libs.
Shrug. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to bother helping people who don’t use aptitude. If you want to work with difficult UI’s , I’m afraid you’re on your own!
[quote="<MagicSpark.org [ BlueSky ]>,post:29,topic:26827"]
Hey, arne you’re kidding man… Just take a look at : http://www.autopackage.org/. These men did great work, really… If I had to compile my game with GCJ and distribute it under Linux, I would autopackage it… seems really great !
[/quote]
so why does nobody tell me about it ?!?
- is java distributed with autopackage?
so a big lack of information spreading… 
Swpalmer, press System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.
There’s your GUI!
cough bullshit cough <- please note smilie
Actually I can’t confirm that this isn’t the case, but I certainly have seen nothing that would suggest it to be so, and considering that Windows doesn’t even ship a compiler on the install disk, I find it highly unlikely. Yes there are several different kernels and hardware abstraction layers that are auto selected at install time, but I doubt anything is actually compiled at install time when installing Windows XP… But even if it was - I didn’t have to do it, nor did I even have to be aware that it was happening. That’s how it should be of course… forcing every end user to become a developer because your sfotware install process is archaic junk is not the solution.
Sure, if you want to live with not having any software until some nerd decides to package it for your particular version of Linux. If you are lucky it might happen before your entire kernel is out of date.
[quote]If you just installed java as a .deb package, it would work. What you tried to do was partially break an existing package by downloading and copying onto your hard disk (NB: not “installing”) “random crap” that comes with no uninstaller.
[/quote]
Um, no. As far as I could tell there was no existing package for Sun’s Java. At least notihing up-to-date. just some GNU crap that should never have been installed since it isn’t good for anything.
What I did was run the only installer widely available for Sun’s Java.
What I did was use what Sun provides.
What I did was follow the one obvious and intuitive process that should be the most likely to succeed in the majority of cases.
I did what, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly what Sun expects me to do to get their Java onto my Linux machine if it wasn’t already available through the GUI provided by the distro for installing known packages. And it if Linux was at all usable it would have worked.
[quote]NB: I’m not criticising you here, just putting it into perspective. What I see most frustrating for newcomers to debian is that fundamental issues like this one are NOT EXPLAINED during the initial install - it would save so much pain if they were! Likewise, newcomers should NEVER be told to use the abominable apt-get, when debian comes with a program with a decent (not excellent) UI - aptitude.
[/quote]
Actually, I just discovered apt-get… (wish it was documented and had a proper UI - you say that would be ‘aptitude’ ?), and it saved the day.
I had to get Subversion compiled and due to other annoying unixy things, had to of course manually install all sorts of dependancies (that the Subversion team thinks it is reasonable to supply source code only is laughable… but probably inevitable given the sorry state of affaris involving simple things like installing software for Linux)
apt-get was my saviour there… since I first checked the GUI package manager/software installer thingy and found absolutely nothing that I needed - basic things like GCC were not available via the Ubuntu package manager.
apt-get, which I had only seen a few references too in other Linux posts worked beautifully. Now, I admit I won’t be surprized if it totally screwed my Linux install… because that is what I have come to expect from Linux. But it seems to have worked well.
I find it strange that Windows and Mac don’t have these problems of having the end users dig around to install all these dependancies. On Windows or Mac you get an installer and you run it and you are done. No wild goose chases involved, unless of course you are installing a package developed by unix nerds and ported to Windows/Mac as an after-thought.
The Linux community desparately needs to solve that problem.
I believe the problem was that the script assumed that various C and C++ compilers were available… and quite frankly I did too, since I’ve never seen a unix install without them. But Ubuntu did not install them and had no option to install them… I have them now, by running apt-get, as I neede them for Subversion. (Funny thing, Subversion required me to install C++ , which didn’t come by default with the rest of the GNU compiler stuff for some reason, even though Subversion is coded enitrely in C and purposely avoided C++. Why did they avoid C++ , given that you can use C++ as a “better C” if you choose? I found that funny, but I looked it up and it seems the decision to use only C was because C++ was unreliable on unix – can you believe it? I can, because I’ve used Linux :)[quote]
[/quote]
again
installing java on any linux is as easy as:
install the .bin package
open the /etc/profile script (as root) and add the following
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/java/jdk" # or whatever directory you chosen to install the jdk into.
export JAVA_BIN="$JAVA_HOME/bin"
export PATH="$JAVA_BIN:$JAVA_HOME:$PATH" # PATH _AFTER_ the others
restart the X server or reset the console if you are not running any x server (improvable since you are complaining of how dificult is to press the “next” button).
Shrug. Whatever. I used to be an NT sysadmin. I’ve had to deal with this. Search the knowledgebase for something like “taking a disk image of windows and installing it in a new computer” - win2k and IIRC xp too can fail to boot completely because they have a custom kernel that doesnt match the hardware they’re installed on. It was all about the HAL, IIRC (surprise!). Off the top of my head, there are 4 or 5 basic kernels for windows, and there’s some modular bits on top. You only get what you need when you run the installer.
Except, as I pointed out (from personal experience), that it can and does happen that windows users have to deal with this. Sigh.
Of course. And I’ve spent a long time trying to persuade a lot of people that “recompile your kernel” is NOT a valid solution to common problems :).
Sure, if you want to live with not having any software until some nerd decides to package it for your particular version of Linux. If you are lucky it might happen before your entire kernel is out of date.
No, there is no “if” about it. This is the way it works. You cannot install stuff otherwise. This is fundamental to Debian the OS, and for many people it is all there is to Debian.
Packaging is generally up to date, and nowadays pretty much all linux software is covered - but that;s an entirely separate issue :).
Um, no. As far as I could tell there was no existing package for Sun’s Java. At least notihing up-to-date. just some GNU crap that should never have been installed since it isn’t good for anything.
[/quote]
See my previous post. There is a package, it converts teh Sun download into a genuine debian package, I’ve been using it on everything from live servers with tens of thousands of clients down to my Dell laptop. For FUBAR political reasons, several debian maintainers try to deny its existence. Please direct furious rants in their direction, they are only causing large amoutns of pain for a long line of newcomers to debian, but seem completely impervious to all reasonable attempts at sanity :(.
See above. If it weren’t for a bunch of idiots, you wouldn’t have been through this crap. IMHO, it’s totally unacceptable and I have no idea why they persist in it.
It is documented, both with intereactive help (-h, not very good but a quick reference) and man pages.
Man pages are the unix form of documentation, so…
Nope - see above: it is guaranteed not to have screwed your linux install (modulo very rare occasions where a bug leaks through. I’ve only ever seen that happen once in my life out of hundreds of thousands of installs)
Yeah, windows has DLL hell instead, and registry-hell. You’re comparing apples to oranges. Windows shunts these problems out of the install script and elsehwere in the OS, but the same problems exist and are just as bad. I think the only reason more people don’t realise this is that it takes a fairly deep understanding of the two OS’s to see this, because of their different designs.
Okay, we agree… But the bunch of idiots are there, they run the show… and so I did have to go through all that crap and the point is moot. What you are basically saying is that the problem wouldn’t exist if it was solved…no kidding?
Well that may be what passed for documentation in the 1970’s… but it is almost a “hidden feature”. The primary issue is that I have to do the work of installing dependancies manually to get things to work. The user experience is awful. In many cases I have to compile code myself, as an end user. And thus I am forced to deal with the compiler warnings and errors that come up as if it was MY job to debug the damn stuff. It’s ridiculous.
Registry hell? Never heard of it, and as far as I can guess, I’ve never experienced it.
DLL Hell? That general problem that is “shared libraries” that is just as bad on Linux?
It actually never happens these days… because Microsoft finally started documenting what DLLs were to be installed in shared locations (system32) and what the rules must be for replacing them. All other DLLs are placed in the application directory these days such that DLL Hell has been a “solved” problem for years.
To claim that the problems are “just as bad” on Windows is ridiculous. This problem is now very rare on Windows… I haven’t seen it happen this millenium. :-). Yet I have encountered the issue numerous times while trying to deal with Linux.
In an ideal world .deb packages would be the only thing provided for Linux software installs. You would download them, from anywhere, because they would all work with all versions of Linux - at least for the same processor architecture, you would double click it and that would be all there is to it. We are still a long way from that.
Side note:
Actually Java is repeating those “DLL Hell” mistakes with JAR Hell… so people have to come to these forums to discover that they shouldn’t have installed JOGL in the “ext” folder of the JRE… where it intuitively belongs, but logically can’t be placed. Will we ever learn?
Were way off-opic, sort of… and I stand by my original claims that the best Linux to use is the one you can get to work, because using linux generally offers a vastly inferior user experience… it’s like the OS has been in perpetual beta with tons of problems for the last decade or so. IT occassionally seems to be working well… then you try to get work done and hit a brick wall. That’s been my experience every single time I give it a try… And I WANT it to work well… I only try it over and over again, because I have hope that one day it will “work”… but today it is clearly in last place. Mac OS X provides the best user experience… (though it comes with it’s own issues). Windows is a distant second… and Linux is not even on the map. I expect that Vista will close the gap a bit on OS X… but there is still no solution in sight for the problems that plague Linux.
Sorry for taking up so much space with these mostly irrelvant posts
swpalmer, Linux is far ahead of Windows in my humble user experience. I’m sorry things don’t work out for you. You keep talking about recompilation of kernels and programs, stuff I’ve never had to do. Installation of software is generally a “click, click, click, apply”-experience with synaptic without any rummaging around on the internet. I’ve installed, like, three programs which were not in the synaptic databases, and those programs are unusable to non-geeks. Last, the amount of guides and howtos that are available ensure the solution of any remaining worthwhile problem I have yet encountered, which mostly have to do with bad driver support of ATI, and that is unfortunate but it is not an actual linux problem.
I don’t want to turn this into a flamewar, but you state stuff which is technically false, highly subjective or questionable, etc… I, too, could go on for hours about my infinite problems with all versions of Windows, but no one wants to hear that. It probably doesn’t apply to others, because they have other hardware or whatever.
Blah^3 brought it up, I simply mentioned how absurd it is. I have never done it myself, I was commenting based on what I was told by others.
[quote]Installation of software is generally a “click, click, click, apply”-experience with synaptic without any rummaging around on the internet. I’ve installed, like, three programs which were not in the synaptic databases, and those programs are unusable to non-geeks.
[/quote]
What is synaptic? I’ve never encountered the term before, but I’ve only tried RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu.
It’s not like I’m trying to make things difficult for myself. I follow the Ui menus to the bit that says “install software” and search for what I want in the list. I have found that if you don’t find it, you’re generally screwed and the goose chase begins.
[quote] Last, the amount of guides and howtos that are available ensure the solution of any remaining worthwhile problem I have yet encountered, which mostly have to do with bad driver support of ATI, and that is unfortunate but it is not an actual linux problem.
[/quote]
I have seen such things and sought them out when I’ve had problems. I find they are often incomplete or simply don’t work. A case in point is the thread mentioned above about installing Sun’s Java. I’ve had the same experience trying to get Samba to work in the past.
[quote]I don’t want to turn this into a flamewar,
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Nor do I. I simply hope to spare some people from the agony that I have experienced.
[quote] but you state stuff which is technically false, highly subjective or questionable, etc…
[/quote]
I’ve only documented what I have personally experienced. If you believe it to be false I can’t stop you, but you are going to have a hard time proving your case to me.
[quote] I, too, could go on for hours about my infinite problems with all versions of Windows, but no one wants to hear that. It probably doesn’t apply to others, because they have other hardware or whatever.
[/quote]
I have had my share of problems with every OS I’ve used. Perhaps I set my expectations too high. But I’m no novice. OS X certainly isn’t an exception: e.g. printer support on a Windows network is quite poor. Connecting iPod’s and removable flash media often leads to lock ups., etc.
I’m just stating the facts. I don’t claim that they represent the experience of anyone but myself. But they are most certainly not fabricated and I know that most of my colleagues have had similar experiences with Linux. (We are not a dumb bunch.)
You are of course entitled to your opinion that “Linux is far ahead of Windows” , but quite frankly I find that notion hilarious, because in my experience it has been so vastly inferior to any other OS I’ve tried in the last 20 years, not counting the C64, DOS, or Windows 3.1 through WinME (I went straight to Windows NT). And trust me I love to hate Microsoft