Mine the Harvest

With Lucid, the standard Ubuntu repos no longer contain the Sun version of Java, having opted instead to just go with openjdk. While I can certainly understand the desire to have openjdk be the truly open solution, I am accustomed to the Sun version. Also, when using java-6-openjdk , I ran into a very annoying situation where apt kept running into the following issue when you attempted any transaction:

error adding signet.pl/signet_ocspklasa3_pem.crt
error adding signet.pl/signet_pca2_pem.crt
error adding signet.pl/signet_pca3_pem.crt
error adding signet.pl/signet_rootca_pem.crt
error adding signet.pl/signet_tsa1_pem.crt
error adding spi-inc.org/spi-ca-2003.crt
error adding spi-inc.org/spi-cacert-2008.crt
error adding telesec.de/deutsche-telekom-root-ca-2.crt
failed (VM used: java-6-openjdk).
dpkg: error processing ca-certificates-java (–configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

In addition, I was having trouble with the openjdk in Eclipse with Subversive and was longing for the Sun Java version. But it was nowhere to be found in the repos. Sigh.

I Googled about and saw a lot of similar difficulties and frustration that the Sun version was not available. Sure, you can install it and the browser plugins, etc. manually, but really – why? Fortunately, I was able to find a simple solution to install sun-java6-jdk on Lucid!

This very simple fix came from this blog site.

Just remove openjdk if you already installed it:

sudo apt-get remove  openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin

Now, set up the partners repo and install Sun Java from there:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository &#34deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner&#34
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin

Done!