Java on Debian

Thanks to Ben for passing this on. You can now do a straight forward “apt-get install sun-java5–jre” and have it install on Debian and Ubuntu. Due to the old licensing restrictions you used to have to package up the installation yourself and was a real pain. Our Teamprise client needs the Sun JRE because it contains the various encryption bits necessary for NTLM authentication to work – hopefully this will make life easier for our customers running Debian based distributions such as the growingly popular Ubuntu. See Simon Phipp’s weblog for more details. Gentoo will have it soon too and any other GNU/Linux or OpenSolaris distributions are welcome to join in the fun.

Correction: As Shaw points out in the comments, we don’t need the Sun JRE, we just need the encryption bits. The JRE from IBM and JRockit from BEA also contain the relevant bits. It’s just that GCJ as installed by default on Debian does not have them.