Okay apparently Breezy comes with some funky GNU version of java 1.4... Forget that... I need to get the most up to date JDK, JRE and J2EE and it is proving to be A TON harder than on other distro's. I've installed Java on Fedora and Mandriva several times just using the RPM. The lack of RPM's in Ubuntu is terrible... I cannot even really relay my problem... See I'm either stuck with a self-installation RPM which Ubuntu cannot use (it wants a deb file). Or I'm stuck with a self-extracting bin file, which extracts fine but leaves me no way to install the thing... I am following the instructions here but I get stuck at installing the java-packages via apt-get... Even with all the repositories added it still says "E: Couldn't find package java-packages" Instructions: http://www.redtailcanyon.com/items/1467517.aspx

Its because java-packages is not in your repository. I don't have all the info but I had to download the java-packages.deb file the last time I did it. But ther e is a repository for it I just don't remember which one. I'm sure you'll find it on Ubuntu's Forums.

Well I just added every repository under the Repository settings.
However that wasn't the problem...

java-packages
vs
java-package


The guy who wrote that site had a minor typo. Afaik I have it all now.

have you tried using the java blackdown packages that should be in Synaptic? I dont know where they are exactly but you can get them by typing

sudo apt-get install jdk1.4

then, if you still need the jdk1.4 runtime, try

sudo apt-get install jre1.4

Another alternative is to use the free set of tools, but I don't know how well this works.

sudo apt-get install free-java-sdk

The thing that is tricky about these is the fact that few of the java packages on Ubuntu install well...You need to make sure that you have ALL of the alternative compilers removed except the one you want, then you need to add the directory of the one you want to your PATH variable to get a command line interface; (If you use eclipse, it can detect it automatically, however)

The directory on my system of the blackdown packages is /usr/lib/jdk

Good luck

Quote: The lack of RPM's in Ubuntu is terrible...

I actually think that the debian packaging system is more capable and robust than the RPM, but that is beside the point. If you REALLY want to use linux packages in RPM form on Debian(er, I mean, Ubuntu :) ) then check out the alien package.

on breezy, install it with

sudo apt-get install alien

This program can convert *.rpm files for your architecture into equivilent *.deb files, which can then be installed with

sudo dpkg -i <file>.deb

and it worked great for me every single time I have tried it.

Yes I have alien installed and that was my first try. To use the Java RPM's and convert them to DEB. However that didn't work, resulted in errors. If you check my last post and my first post there is a link which explains the proper way to convert it. (make-jpkg).

As for using anything but the official Sun java... I cannot, impossible, in fact I'm not sure why anyone would waste time creating a GNU Version, BlackDown packages (they are installed by default with ubuntu breezy). But my need for the REAL Sun Java is work related so...

Anyway, thanks for all the tips.

Use the tool make-jpkg in java-package to make debs from sun's official downloads. Sun's java distribution can't be included directly, because of Sun's licensing.
sudo apt-get install java-package && man make-jpkg

This link should help

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76702&highlight=java

Thank you.
So far JDK and JRE converted fine.
It is unable to convert J2EE which I need for Blazix, but I'll do some research on that specifically.

I wouldn't mess with a package manager. It sounds like you managed to extract from Sun's self-extracting bin file. To install, just copy the extracted directory to /usr/java1.5 (or whatever you want to call it), create a symlink from /usr/java1.5 to /usr/java. Then set JAVA_HOME to /usr/java, and add /usr/java/bin to your path. If you need help with any of those steps, let me know. The symlinking step is to prevent the package manager from inadvertently trashing your installation of Java if some other package depends on a buggy or old VM, and just to make it easy to switch between versions.

Blackdown is based on the official Sun JVM. The other VMs that were built from scratch exist for some combination of wider hardware/platform compatibility, reasearch, or GPL zealotry.