Janko in a Jar

Image via Wikipedia Installing Java on Debian is more problematic than it could be because not of technical issues but because Debian’s ultra nice apt-get “gets” only clear open source things and Java (JVM) while it was always free is getting (or got - Java is a big thing) open sourced only recently.

It turns out that the procedure is very simple at the end but the biggest problem was finding out which “how-to” article is the recent one. I read many different tutorials about it but nothing worked and it’s hard to even find out if something you are reading is old 1 month or 10 years. There should be a creation date posted at every doc on the internet!

Ok, so I found the currently working and a normal way of doing it at last in some blog comment!

You need to change sources of apt-get a little. Edit file /etc/apt/sources.list to look like this

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

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

And then you can hapily run

apt-get update
apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

in console and life makes sense once again.

Yes, I didn’t get the latest Java but this version is all I need in my case (and most packages/servers support it).

You don’t need to be a a Java programmer to want JVM on your debian VPS. You have a lot of interesting languages on JVM these days. Like Clojure, Groovy and Scala, and ports of C versions like JRuby, Jython, Quercus (php). There is also a bunch of interesting servers written on JVM like adobe/flex related stuff, Red5, OpenLazslo, Tomcat, Jetty…

And it is known that JVM people are now interested in making it even better VM for all sorts of dynamic and functional languages.