Originally posted by Chris De Vries:
I've always just skipped the rpm package and used the shell install jdk package. I just run the shell script in /usr/local and have not had any problems. Plus it's easy to have multiple jres or jdks on the system if you store them all in /usr/local. I'm not exactly sure how to maintain multiple jres using the rpm packages.
Chris
For the
Java SDK, RPM or shell install are equally good. RPMs are at their most useful when you're trying to install a package that infuses commands, libraries, docfiles, etc. into the standard system locations. The JDK works better off in its own directory subtree, though, so even a simple TAR or UNZIP operation suffices.
The "conventional" location for J2SDKs is in /usr/java, not /usr/local (nothing's hard-coded based on this, however) and the actual JDK is a subdirectory underneath that subtree, such as "/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.0". So I'd select the 1.4 SDK by doing a "JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.0". Hopefully Sun's finally settling on a consistent naming scheme now, though that's mostly a matter for MY convenience, not my software's.
The RPMs also have the java version encoded in their package name, so my 1.4.0 J2SDK's RPM name is "j2sdk-1.4.0-fcs". Because of that, you can easily work with multiple J2SDK versions.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.