F8 Java

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Starting with Fedora 8, IcedTea is now available (adapted from OpenJDK from Sun):

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See the release notes for Fedora 8. However, I still prefer installing JRE. Since it is still not recommended to use the Sun Java RPM, we will install it by hand into /opt. Be sure that SELinux has been configured properly before starting (see the SELinux page).

Installing Java

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Open your favorite web browser and go to Sun's download page for Java SE, which is located at:


Scroll down the page and look for the latest update to the "Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 4". Click on the Download button, choose Linux under Platform, and click the button to accept the license agreement.  Then click Continue. Choose the "Linux self-extracting file" link, which corresponds to jre-6u4-linux-i586.bin. After it downloads, copy the file to /opt:
Now change into the /opt directory:
And change the permissions of the file so that it is executable:
Next, run the binary file using sudo:
Continue to press the space bar until you scroll down to the end of the license agreement. Type "yes" and hit Enter. Wait for the installation to complete, and delete the binary file:
Evidentially there is a bug in one of the libraries, but it can be fixed with the following commands:
Configuring the Java plugin

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To configure the Java plugin, simply create the appropriate soft link to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins:
Restart Firefox to enable the Java plugin. To test it, go to http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml.

NOTE:  The compat-libstdc++-33 libraries are required for the Java plugin to work.  If it is not installed, use yum:
Configuring Java for Other Applications

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To configure java for additional applications, we need to create a couple of profile files in /etc/profile.d. For the bash shell, create a file /etc/profile.d/java.sh with the following information:
Next, create a file /etc/profile.d/java.csh for csh/tcsh shells:
If you are using bash as your default shell, source the java.sh file:
If you are using csh/tcsh as your default shell, as I am, source the java.csh file instead:
To verify that we will use the newly installed java application, type:
You should see:
Next we will use the alternatives command to further configure F8 to use jre1.6.0_04. Type:
This configures jre1.6.0_04 as an alternative to the generic java implementation that comes bundled with F8 and IcedTea. To choose it, type:
in which case, you should see:
Press '3' and hit Enter. Finally, type:
You should see that the link currently points to /opt/jre1.6.0_02/bin/java:
You are now able to install and run Java applications!