This might not be an actual
Java problem, but its name does come up...
Trying to run a help app for IDL, a software tool popular with astronomers
and other scientician types. see
https://www.ittvis.com/ if you're curious. IDL itself runs fine but its little buddy program idlhelp ought to running from the bash command line. We're getting no joy but only this error message:
/usr/local/bin/idlhelp: 476: /usr/local/itt/idl/idlde/bin.linux.x86/jre/bin/java: not found
This might look like a case of the "java" file at the mentioned location being missing, but it's really there:
> ls -l /usr/local/itt/idl/idlde/bin.linux.x86/jre/bin/ja*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 65076 2007-11-08 15:14 /usr/local/itt/idl/idlde/bin.linux.x86/jre/bin/java
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25730 2007-11-08 15:14 /usr/local/itt/idl/idlde/bin.linux.x86/jre/bin/java_vm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 175978 2007-11-08 15:14 /usr/local/itt/idl/idlde/bin.linux.x86/jre/bin/javaws
This is happening on an Ubuntu 7.10 (?) system. Already did the obvious thing
three weeks ago - call ITT-VIS help, but they're stumped. Rumor is that other
Linux/GNU users are having this problem. It may have something to do with
32/64-bit issues, or maybe java is being found just fine but some other
file isn't found, and the error message is slightly insane.
One bit of excitement today - on another machine which is quite similar, it works fine. That machine has java-6 installed. The bad machine didn't. Installed java-6 using synaptic. Problem remains.
Maybe one of you old hands around has an idea what's going on?