Time for action – installing JRE on Ubuntu

We will install Oracle JRE 1.6. As mentioned previously, there is no Ubuntu package for Java 6; we are going to perform a manual installation.

1. Visit the download area at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre6u37-downloads-1859589.html.

2. Download the tar.gz archive, choosing the 32-bit or 64-bit archive, depending on the Ubuntu edition you are working with. You must accept the license agreement (reading it might be a nice idea) before you can select one of the tar.gz archives (be sure to avoid rpm archives as they are not for Debian-based Linux distribution).

3. Save the archive to your home folder and extract it.

   ~ $ chmod a+x jre-6u37-linux-x64.bin
   ~ $ ./jre-6u37-linux-x64.bin
   

4. The JRE 6 package is extracted into ./jre1.6.0_37 folder. Now move the JRE 6 directory to /opt and create a symbolic link to it in the default folder for libraries.

   ~ $ sudo mv ./jre1.6.0_37* /opt
   ~ $ sudo ln -s /opt/jre1.6.0_37 /usr/lib/jvm/
   

5. Let's check the...