ellioth's blog entry on
upgrading to Dapper Drake (ubuntu 6.06) makes it sound safe and simple to do, so maybe I'll take the dive. However he talks about installing Sun's Java on the system.
As he mentions, and as
we pointed out on the jdk-distros site getting the JRE there is pretty trivially done. Getting the JDK installed is a little less trivial, just poke around in the synaptic package manager and you'll find it.
As for update-alternatives ... there's a command, update-java-alternatives that takes care of switching the whole set of Java related commands together. It would, after all, be rather confusing to have the plugin alternative be from one vendor, and the java alternative from a different vendor.
David Herron:
David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
