The IBM JDK offers performance benefits over Sun's JDK, which is especially useful when playing around with, say, the
Scala interpreter. Installing it on Ubuntu can be a little tricky, but here's how you do it:
- Download the IBM JDK version 6 here.
- Install fakeroot and java-package with sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package.
- Edit /usr/share/java-package/ibm-j2sdk.sh and add this on line 28:
"ibm-java-sdk-6.0-1.0-linux-i386.tgz" ) # SUPPORTED
j2se_version=1.6.0${revision}
j2se_expected_min_size=82 # 85983232 bytes
found=true
;;
- Navigate to the directory where the JDK was downloaded and execute fakeroot make-jpkg ibm-java-sdk-6.0-1.0-linux-i386.tgz.
- Install the debian package that was created.
- Type sudo update-alternatives --config java to choose to use the IBM JDK.
Note: Previously, I had always installed JDKs manually, but if you want to use the JDKs that come in the repositories, make sure to pick up
libreadline-java and
libjline-java to make it easier to work with the
scala interative shell.