Hello everyone,

i am running a debian etch with tomcat5.5.

Unfortunatly, debian's installation of tomcat forces gcj as java vm.

And I'm so sick of gcj,
it may work nice to do a System.out.println("Hello World") but that's about all it can do right!

Don't get me wrong...
I totally agree with open-source's philosophy...
but the legal aspect put aside, i cant figure out any reason to use such a useless tool as gcj. It never work as expected and cannot meet professional expectations.

So I downloaded the jdk from SUN
but it seems setting JAVA_HOME in ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile doesnt affect path and so i cannot set jvm right (it keeps choosing gcj, which is bad).

Can i safely remove those links (java/javac) in /usr/bin and replaced them with my own link to SUN's jdk?
Since i have tomcat installed, i cannot remove gcj without breaking dependancies.. synaptic suggest removing tomcat as well..
and i need tomcat for/at work, and i prefer wasting weeks and months to install SUN's jdk or working with tomcat on windows xp than using the already installed gcj.

Thanks in advance

install sun-java5-jre

then (as root) update-alternatives --config java

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanx for the quick reply,
update-alternatives --config java was the command i was looking for.
I thought the command was something like 'java-config' lol (it's probably only a tool existing on Gentoo)


I'd rather not using jre5 because it is only a renamed jre1.4.2 plus minor changes.
I downloaded the jdk bin on oracle's website and installed it in /opt/jdk1.6.0_18/

I added to the /etc/profile:
export JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.6.0_18
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

But nothing is installed in the /etc/alternatives so update-alternatives cannot find anything else than gcj in the 'java group'.

So i read a little about update-alternatives and in the debian FAQ, i found how to add my jdk to the 'java group':

# update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/java 90

# update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /opt/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/javac 90

As said in the FAQ:
The first argument to `--install' option is the symlink that points to /etc/alternatives/NAME, where NAME is the second argument. The third argument is the program to which /etc/alternatives/NAME should point to, and the fourth argument is the priority (larger value means the alternative will more probably get picked automatically).

The result is:
# update-alternatives --config java
Il y a 2 alternatives fournissant «Â*javaÂ*».

Sélection Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
1 /usr/bin/gij-wrapper-4.1
*+ 2 /opt/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/java

Appuyez sur Entrée pour conserver la valeur par défaut[*] ou choisissez le numéro sélectionnéÂ*:2
Utilisation de «Â*/opt/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/javaÂ*» pour fournir «Â*javaÂ*».
# java -version
java version "1.6.0_18"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_18-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode, sharing)

Thanx again

Oh, well, the reason I told you to install sun-java5-jre is because it's in Etch and sun-java6-jre isn't, and so you wouldn't have to go through the manual alternatives process.

1 members found this post helpful.