I have Mandrake 9.0 setup (waiting for the real release of Gentoo 1.4) but I ran into a problem with Java. I managed to the JDK 1.4.1 installed, but when I open up e-term and type in: java --version I'm greeted with 1.07 Kaffee version. Now, when I installed the JDK I put su'd to root, and I installed it in /home/sean. I think by default it put it in /home/sean/s1studio-1.4.1 (or something like that). Now, if I cd to that directory and type in java --version, I get the correct response of version 1.4.1 Realizing that the JDK installed didn't change the environment variable for PATH, I typed in set and looked for my directory of /home/sean/s1studio-1.4.1/bin somewhere in the list. Sure enough, I didn't see it in there. So here's the stupid question of the day, where is the original java and how do I override it so that when I call anything from the /home/sean/s1studio-1.4.1/bin directory, it's actually calling those executables? Even if I just do something like: set PATH=:/home/sean/s1studio-1.4.1/bin If I call javac HelloWorld.class will it use the javac from ~/s1studio-1.4.1/bin like I want it to, and not the java 1.07 kaffee version (wherever that's coming from)? As another quick question, I realize that putting it in /home/sean isn't really a good idea, so what's a better alternative? Should I create some kind of folder that all users can have access too? I'm afraid of putting stuff in /usr/local or /usr/opt since I have no idea what gets put in there. [edited by - Dauntless on December 23, 2002 3:33:03 AM]

To set the path, in bash, type ''export PATH=/home/sean/blah:$PATH''. Or put it in ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile (the files are used at different times, but I can''t remeber which is which).

/usr/local or /opt is the ideal place to put it. The distro isn''t supposed to touch /usr/local, it''s purely for packages that aren''t part of the distro. And, everything in /opt is supposed to have it''s own directory, so it shouldn''t matter if you put anything there. It''s convienent for packages with lots of files that would polute /usr/local.

When you install Java via a rpm, it''ll install to the /usr/java/j2sdk1.XXXXX directory. Thus, I think that would be the ideal place to put it, if you didn''t install it via rpm.

If you want to set the PATH globally, edit /etc/profile. Being fairly new to Linux, I don''t know if that''s a great idea, but I can''t see anything wrong with it.