Installing Sun JDK 1.6 on CentOS

CentOS doesn’t have a package for Sun JDK so it has to installed manually. It’s fairly easy but there are some steps to do that. This guide has been tested on CentOS 5.4 x64_86.

Step 1. Initial setup for building RPM
-!- Do this with a non-root user

1. Create ~/.rpmmacros

   • $ vim ~/.rpmmacros
     %_topdir /home//rpmbuild
     %_tmppath %{_topdir}/tmp
     

2. Create needed folders:

   • $ mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{SOURCES,SRPMS,SPECS,RPMS,tmp,BUILD}
     

3. Build environment needs to be complete. Some needed packages are:

   • $ sudo yum install -y rpm-build gcc gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config
     

Step 2. Installing your favorite JDK

1. Download Sun JDK 1.6 update 14 from Sun Java download or the Sun JDK archive.
   • Choose the correct platform (for me it’s Linux x64) and download jdk-6u18-linux-x64-rpm.bin
2. Give it executable rights: $ chmod 755 jdk-6u18-linux-x64-rpm.bin
3. Run the binary to extract it into RPM form: $ ./jdk-6u18-linux-x64-rpm.bin
4. Install it:

   • $ sudo rpm -Uvh jdk-6u18-linux-amd64.rpm
     

5. Log out and in again to make the changes in the paths take effect
6. Check the install

   • $ java -version
     java version "1.6.0_18"
     Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_18-b07)
     Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode)
     

7. Java is now installed on /usr/bin/java