Hello,

I have a shell account on one of my university's servers, so I don't have root access. The only version of java currently available is the gnu version, but I need the sun version. I'd like to put everything in /home/me/usr/bin and then change that to my default java compiler. Is that possible without root access?

The server is running "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)" the kernel version is 2.6.18-128.1.10 the current java version is "java version "1.4.2" gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44)"

If anyone could point me in the right direction, or even tell me why this would be a Really Bad Idea, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

It is common to see local applications running their own supplied version of Java and even Apache so I'd say the basic answer to your "is it possible" question is yes.

As to whether or not you have permissions to download and install such a local version that depends on the way your server is setup. You likely don't have permission to run rpm as a non-root user so you'd need to get something like a gzipped tar bundle (usually these have a tar.gz or .tgz extension on the end).

By the way there can be multiple Java versions installed on the OS so you might be able to get your system administrator to install the version you need and just point to it. In fact it may already be there and you just need to point to it. Check to see what is in /usr/lib/java.