Friday 23 May 2008

Stupid Stupid Sun Linux VM installer %$&*%-up

Suns rpm Linux installer includes a number of unversioned resources for common installable packages.  So if you attempt to install something like "xml-commons-apis" with rpm or yum, the package manager tries to obsolete the unversioned package, and the only provider it can find is the jdk itself. 

So after installing this package, you suddenly discover your JDK has vaporised. 

So far there appears to be no known work around, other than to build a new sun jdk package from the src, which does not provide the unversioned packages. 

This fault has been around since feb 2007, and has not been fixed, I hit it when trying to install a red5 flash server, and could not get ant to run because it cant find the resource. 

Why is Java system configuration so damm hard? 




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think I came over a similar problem, thus I decided to use some stuff from jpackage to create rpms usable on linux but based on the JDK coming from SUN. It was quite easy to build rpms packages from the non-free SRPMs that jpackage.org is providing. Maybe you won't have the latest latest version of the jvm
but your jdk should integrate correctly in your system.