Monday, June 4, 2007

Installing non-free Sun Java on Debian

There seems to be some confusion (at least for some folks) about what it takes to install Sun's Java on Debian. It is against Debian's policy to distribute "non-free" packages in the main tree, however, that's exactly what the "non-free" repository is for.

Using the Debian web site's package search will quickly show that they do, in fact, offer "commercial" java packages.

For etch 4.0 (stable), just add "non-free" to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free

Run (as root, of course) "apt-get update" then "apt-cache search java2" and you'll find:

sun-java5-jdk
sun-java5-jre

Currently they are version 1.5.0-10-3.

To install them run:
    apt-get install sun-java5-jdk sun-java5-jre