Install Sun J2SE Development Kit 6.0 (JDK 6.0)

Otherwise, if you are using Ubuntu 7.04 or higher (or similar), you can install Sun Java 6 simply with an apt-get command. The following commands show the installation of the binaries, and of the JDK (the latter is required for Tomcat):

  sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin
  sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

and then optionally set the default version in your system with

  sudo update-java-alternatives

Full details of the installation of Sun Java on Ubuntu 7.04 or higher is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java .

Alternatively, you can download the latest Java from Sun directly .

Install Sun J2SE Development Kit 5.0 (JDK 5.0)

If you are using Ubuntu 7.04 or higher, you can install Sun Java 5 simply with an apt-get command. The following commands show the installation of the binaries, and of the JDK (the latter is required for Tomcat):

  sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin
  sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

and then optionally set the default version in your system with

  sudo update-java-alternatives

Full details of the installation of Sun Java on Ubuntu 7.04 or higher is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java . These instructions are for java 6, so just replace any instance of the number "6" in the instructions with the number "5".

Alternatively, you can download Java 1.5.x from Sun directly .

Check Your Installation

Make sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointing to the directory where you installed the JDK.

If using the "apt-get install" method for Ubuntu described above combined with the update-java-alternatives command, you should already have this variable set.