Hi, I'm using bash as my shell and I've installed Forte CE from sun and set up my .bashrc script with a JAVA_PATH variable and export and it works fine.
So why post? Well Forte is too big and memory hungry for me at the moment as I'm a beginner and my code is only small so my question is this - how do I set up to be able to call javac mycode.jav from my shell and have it compile etc like you can in Windoze?
I plan to use gedit to write the source and hope to just have a terminal window on screen to run the commands in the bin directory of my jdk directory (jdk1.3).
Hope someone can help and thanks in advance if you do.

Find the directory with the java binaries in it and add that to your $PATH.

e.g.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/java/jdk1.3.1/bin

Then you can use the normal commands of:

javac MyClass.java
java MyClass

If you feel up to using emacs instead of nedit you can also grab a wonderful mode (with a name that escapes me right now) that gives you some nice Java keybindings and lets you fire off compile and run from within emacs.

Cheers mate that works a treat!