Installing Sun’s Java on CentOS 5.2

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Chris Schuld

By far the most messy thing on CentOS 5.2 is adding Sun’s Java. I have never found great success from the different packages that are out there for installing java. I prefer to simply use the packages from Sun.

Step (1) : Visit Sun’s web site and download the latest version of Java (the *.bin file not the *-rpm.bin) (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp)(pay close attention if you want the 32bit or 64bit version)

Step (2) :

[user@www]# cd /opt/
[user@www]# wget "[GIANT_SUN_URL_TO_GET_THE_JAVA_BIN_FILE_x64_IN_THIS_CASE]"
[user@www]# /bin/sh jdk-6u7-linux-x64.bin

Step (3) : Setup the alternatives correctly

[user@www]# alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.6.0_07/bin/java 2
[user@www]# alternatives --config java

There are 2 programs which provide 'java'.

  Selection    Command
-----------------------------------------------
*+ 1           /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java
   2           /opt/jdk1.6.0_07/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number: 2
[user@www]#

Step (4) : Check to make sure the install was a success

[user@www]# java -version
java version "1.6.0_07"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_07-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 10.0-b23, mixed mode)
[user@www]#

33 thoughts on “Installing Sun’s Java on CentOS 5.2”

Ranganath on November 14, 2008 at 3:17 am said:

Atlast, this worked. Thanks a lot. Not many people tell how to utilise the alternatives command! Most of all the tutorials in misleading everywhere! Appreciate it!

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Zyrre Forslin on November 25, 2008 at 7:04 pm said:

run as “su -” not just “su”

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Dallas on January 28, 2009 at 7:34 pm said:

Excellent tutorial

I followed your suggestions on my Centos 5.2 machine, opting to download the rpm from sun. If you do, use the following alternatives command:

alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_11/bin/java 2

Dallas

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Chris Schuld on January 28, 2009 at 8:00 pm said:

@Ranganath
Thanks!

@Dallas
Thanks for the update Dallas!

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helikaon on February 22, 2009 at 3:28 pm said:
Thanks a lot for helping out, though i’ve got also small addition to this article (hope it can help someone):
what i have:
CentOS 5.2 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 x86_64 GNU/Linux + firefox 3.0.6 x86_64 + java version “1.6.0_12″ (jre install)
I went ok all the way down you described, so command java -version has shown the correct jre install. But java in firefox wasn working.
Problem was in one plugin that i had to link.
what i did:
```
cd /usr/lib64/firefox-3.0.6/
mkdir plugins
cd plugins
ln -s /opt/jre1.6.0_12/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so libnpjp2.so
```
That did the job for me.
It took me some time to figure it out, because google search was making reference to missing plugin libjavaplugin_oji.so, but that pays for 32 bit firefox version.
This thread at ubuntu helped to findout which plugin was missig for me:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1062477.html

Thanks again, i hope i can help out in turn to someone
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Chris Schuld on February 22, 2009 at 4:22 pm said:

@Helikaon

Thanks for the additional notes, glad it helped out!

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Hey.. thanks for this.. but when I installed everything.. still does not build jedit for me using jedit…. jar..

getting exception in main..
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: jedit42install/jar
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: jedit42install.jar
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: jedit42install.jar.  Program will exit.

any help much appreciated .. thanks

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Chris Schuld on February 27, 2009 at 3:06 pm said:

@Robert

There could be several things going on here: your CLASSPATH could be incorrect (my guess) or you may need to run the alternates command for jar. Let me know if you solve it — tricky to debug without more information on your system.

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Andrei on April 30, 2009 at 6:48 am said:

thanks! it helped.

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Samir on May 5, 2009 at 9:06 am said:

Thanks for the tutorial, it was very helpful for me.

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Alex on May 13, 2009 at 8:11 am said:

Thank you very much! This tutorial saves my day.

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Grey on May 13, 2009 at 10:23 pm said:

Thanks! it works

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fledermaus on June 11, 2009 at 12:30 am said:

Hi, I tried to install java following your tutorial. Everything worked like a charm, I mean, no errors.

But when I do the test typing java -version it says: bash – command not found…

I will try to look up how to set the classpath thingy… So far, no luck…

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RRaph on July 1, 2009 at 7:47 am said:

Very good tutorial.
Dallas’s alternative is working too.
Many thanks.

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Paras Pradhan on July 14, 2009 at 7:54 am said:

Nice short article. Thanks halikaon as well. Did work in centos 5.3 as well.

Paras.

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Ilyse Kazar on August 3, 2009 at 4:34 am said:

Well i gave your instructions a Profoundly Newb Test, since i am only a consultant who does largely PM and is trying to install scrumworks pro which needs java on my web server. CentOS 5.2.

Here are my notes, from the perspective, then, of someone whom it is safe to presume does NOT have lots of experience doing this sort of thing.

1. the wget command worked for my selected version but the file that was saved had the same long name as everything after the final slash in that superlong URL.

IOW the filename also included everything after the ? in the URL (perhaps since i’d read bad things about 6_14 and therefore poked around on Sun’s site to find 6_13). I guess because the filename had all sorts of strange characters in it (% for example) I could not figure out how to use the mv command to change it to its basic jdk-6u13-linux-i586-rpm.bin format … so I went thru my ftp client (Cyberduck) that makes renaming stuff on my web server handy.

2. THIS INSTRUCTION NEEDS … WELL … MORE INSTRUCTION:

Step (3) : Setup the alternatives correctly
[user@www]# alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.6.0_07/bin/java 2

Where does that string come from?? I used it (replacing the _07 with _13 for the version I’d dl’d) but felt very unsure whether it actually did anything. For the instructions to be valid beyond the particular 6_07 version you installed as an example, can you tell us how, after completing steps 1 and 2, one knows exactly what string to put after /opt/ in the above command? thanks

3. SADLY MY INSTALL FAILED:
[/opt]# java -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

thanks anyway. it’s always scary and fun to do stuff to my web server

“

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Barry Wadsworth on January 31, 2010 at 9:42 pm said:

Thanks for you help! I’ve successfully installed jdk1.6.0_18 on CentOS 5.4!

Here are a few notes that may help others:

When I did wget the file name had the url prepended to it. I was able to rename it by putting double quotes around it.

When I did the alternatives command, it isn’t recognized. I exited and used su – instead of su root, then it recognized the alternatives command.

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Martin on February 11, 2010 at 8:08 am said:

is step 1 just to determine the URL? why would you need to download it twice? first time in step 1 and then in step 2 with wget. what am i missing?

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julia on March 3, 2010 at 9:55 pm said:

hello julia here…….microsoft certificateI’m not very smart on installing packages on Linux, but today I need to configure a Tomcat on a CentOS 5.2. The CentOS 5.2 has Tomcat 5 available as yum package, with gcc-java. But Java gurus tell me to use the original Sun JDK to run Tomcat without problems. I know that Tomcat can run with a JRE which is a lot smaller, so I started with download the Java JRE 6 Update 11 from here. I choosed Linux/Multilanguage and accepted the Sun Terms. I downloaded the jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin file wich is an autoinstaller for Linux. After uploading the file in the /root dir, I did a chmod to make the file executable: chmod u+x jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin and then ran it

./jre-6u11-linux-i586.bin

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Jamien on March 14, 2010 at 7:18 am said:

I can not thank you enough for this. Linux noob. Have spent about 6 hard hard hours trying to do this. Thanks so much for taking the time to post this.

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Vishva on March 15, 2010 at 6:40 am said:

@ last its working. Thanks. Must tell you this was the first time I used alternatives.

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Patrick on March 24, 2010 at 8:42 pm said:

I followed your tutorial, but i can’t get reponse from command java -version. My system is a rhel 5.4 64-bits and java 1.6 by sun (rpm binaries). On my tomcat logs shows:
dl failure on line 685Error: failed /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so, because /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Operation not permitted

I’m tried run:
execstack -c /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so
execstack -q /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so

but does not work.

What am i doing wrong?

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arturo cabrera on July 27, 2010 at 7:34 am said:

Gracias por el tutorial con ejemplo. thanks for the example.

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m4r71x on September 27, 2010 at 2:30 pm said:

Thanks for this manual!!!, I couldnt make my java work

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Martin Caine on November 3, 2010 at 3:01 pm said:

Thanks for the great mini article. Needed to replace GNU Java with Sun Java to run a Minecraft server on one of my CentOS boxes and this sorted us out

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Becca on December 11, 2010 at 9:56 pm said:

Thank you! This was very helpful! I was looking for simple step by step instructions versus paragraphs and paragraphs of information.

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Jose on December 14, 2010 at 3:06 am said:

Thanks for the tips, that is by far the easy way to get Java Sun on centos.

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MIke on April 27, 2011 at 11:22 pm said:

Thanks alot!

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Sandy on June 26, 2011 at 4:58 am said:

My VPS Configuration
OS: centos-5-x86_64
VPS Platform: OpenVZ
HDD : 50 GB
Ram : 1 GB

I am trying to install 1 software on my VPS. But java is giving me some problem

[property] java.io.IOException: Cannot run program “/bin/env”: java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory

So then I am tried to allocate heap memory to JVM by using command
# java -Xms128m -Xmx128m DoRunTime

It will give such type of error

Exception in thread “DoRunTime” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: DoRunTime
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: DoRunTime

I am install JAVA using Command # yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel

I have set my JAVA_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64

Also I have set my CLASSPATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/lib/ext/

Also is there need to set PATH???
I Don’t know what is going wrong.

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Naveen on June 27, 2011 at 3:28 am said:

Thanks a lot.. The wiki page of Cent OS was really misdirecting.. I followed this without any problems.. appreciate this blog..

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Ville on July 12, 2011 at 11:08 pm said:

This was very helpful. Got the latest Sun Java easily installed on CentOS 6 with these instructions. Thanks!

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personal musings on the composition of software

Installing Sun’s Java on CentOS 5.2

33 thoughts on “Installing Sun’s Java on CentOS 5.2”

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