Installing Java6 JDK on Ubuntu 12.04

By Leo Gaggl

April 30, 2012

UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors.

UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle. Flexion.org have however created a script (hosted on Github) to allow the automated update of Java 6 for those who still require it as a dependency.

wget https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6/raw/0.2.1/oab-java6.sh -O oab-java6.sh chmod +x oab-java6.sh sudo ./oab-java6.sh

Hat tip to Martin Wimpress from Flexion !

UPDATE: [07-Aug-2012] Thanks to a comment from Pierre-Yves Langlois this seems to be the best method (uses the latest version of the Flexion script from Github rather than the version referenced above)

sudo apt-get purge sun-java* #You need to do that if you want the mozilla plugin to work without conflict with java7 for instance.
mkdir ~/src cd ~/src git clone https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6.git cd ~/src/oab-java6 sudo ./oab-java.sh

Then when its finished, install java:
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk

You can follow the installation process with:
tail -f ~/src/oab-java6/oab-java.sh.log

Note: If you do not need Java 6 it’s much safer to stick to the current Oracle Java 7 release.

This is an update to the Java6 install on 11.10 since the previous PPA repository has not been updated. To install on Precise Pangolin you need to add the following repository

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flexiondotorg/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

EDIT: [01-May-2012] since there seem to be many comments about the repo not working here’s the manual process (since I can’t find any working PPA that is actually maintained).

Download the Linux .bin install (32 or 64bit) from Oracle’s site Java Archive.

#change permissions to allow execute chmod a+x jdk-6u[current_version_number]-linux-i586.bin #run the installer file ./jdk-6u[current_version_number]-linux-i586.bin

Note: you obviously need to also maintain the Java6 updated manually.