@ Chris Wellons:

Wow, that’s kinda silly. Nice of them to screw things up for non-windows users. :P

@ Mitlik:

Ah, yes – the ultimate license.

@ Andrew Zimmerman:

The standalone package from java.com does not actually install anywhere. It is a self extracting archive that just unpacks to the current directory. I figured that putting it in /opt was smarter than leaving it in my home directory. The .deb packages dump files all over the file system but that’s to be expected.

Yea when you start moving stuff around, and having the symlink it back to your created dir… I could see that to be annoying.
I would leave it in its default dir and symlink to your opt, rather than the other way around.
Unless that’s what you did, but either way.

I can understand the opt option though, as I believe chrome installs in the home dir?
I could see that to be annoying to some people. I’m unsure of where java installs, I thought it was all in usr/.

@ Luke Maciak:

You should really be pushing: WTFPL ^_^

I go through a similar process at work on occasion. In order for a computer to gain full network access, it either has to be fully managed by our IT department (Windows systems), or it has log in through a Java applet (Linux, Mac, etc.). There’s an example of “enterprisey stuff” for you. However, it’s a chicken-or-egg problem, since I need* internet access to install OpenJDK from the repositories.

So, like your process above, I grab the self-extracting zip from Sun, put it on a thumb drive, dump it in /tmp, softlink libnpjp2.so to plugins/, log in, apt-get install openjdk-*, then remove the softlink. Since it’s in /tmp, it will get fully blown away on the next reboot. The only difference is that I’m using Firefox instead of Chrome.

On a side note, as you may know, I’m still using Java applets for my little projects. You’re right that Java applets are clunky and HTML5 would be better. However, all my Java projects are originally standalone .jars. Turning them into Java applets is nearly trivial — the same .jar is both an applet and an executable .jar — so I still use applets in order to make my stuff more accessible.

* Yeah, I could manually grab the .debs and all the dependency .debs, but that’s a huge waste of time.

@ Hexren:

That might be quite likely. Ugh… Licensing! Why can’t we all just get along and use GPL or something. :P

All my years using Java on Ubuntu, I never knew there was a “ControlPanel” command! How that got past my googling, we may never know..

Thanks for that!

Hey,

maybe you were hit by this:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2011-Decemb er/001528.html

Licence foo removal of sun from ubuntu repositories.