Category: Debian

For all of my servers I use Debian, however that distribution has a few problems, mainly the packages can be a bit behind the cutting edge.

Now this is usually a good thing if you are looking for stability – cutting edge software can have issues, especially from new features etc, so for a live environment you want something thats stable.

However, there does come a time when this can bite back. You either need a feature thats not in the standard repositories or in this case the version is now unsupported.

In Debian Squeeze it has Java 6 – but that was EOL’d a couple of months ago so is no longer supported by Oracle. The current version is Java 7 update 17.

So how do we get Java 7 installed?

Well it’s pretty easy to do, we just need to add another repository into apt and install it.

First the repository:

sudo su -
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys EEA14886
apt-get update
exit

What that does is to install the ubuntu ppa repository into apt, setup the public keys and then load the package lists.

Next we need to install it:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

This will now download Oracle Java 7 and present you with a couple of screens about licensing. Just ok and accept it and it will now install.

That’s it. You now have Java 7 installed – but it’s not the default JDK (if you already had Java 6 installed). If you want it to be the default then there’s just one more thing to do:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-set-default

That’s a dummy package but it will make Java 7 the default on that machine. If you want to check then you can check:

peter@titan ~ $ java -version
java version "1.7.0_17"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_17-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.7-b01, mixed mode)