This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Weiqi Gao. Original Post: Getting Sun Java 6 On Debian 4.0 With APT Pinning Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml Feed Description: Sharing My Experience... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Weiqi Gao Latest Posts From Weiqi Gao's Weblog

All the noise about Leopard and Java6 last week made me thinking: Does my favorite operating systems include the JDK? And if so, which version?

The answer, of course, is that Windows does come with a JRE, but it's at version 1.1; and that Debian comes with a incomplete open source JRE that's roughly at version 1.4.

Debian 4.0, however, makes getting the higher versions of Java easy. Sun Java 5 is available in Debian 4.0's stable software repository, while Sun Java 6 is available in the Debian unstable software repository. Since neither are free software, they can only be found in the non-free section of the repositories.

Enabling the non-free section of the stable repository in very easy, as I documented here 136 days ago.

Enabling the unstable repository in Debian 4.0 is something that I don't want to do lightly, for I don't want to upgrade every package in my system to the bleeding edge, at least not yet. Jonathan mentioned "APT pinning" when I asked him about this at the time. And learning about APT pinning I did yesterday.

The three degrees of APT pinning

I have gone through three documents that I found on the Google about APT Pinning.

First there's the very clear Apt-Pinning for Beginners. It outlines exactly what to do to enable the testing and unstable repositories in Debian in such a way as to favor the stable repositories's contents.

But I have some unanswered questions, so I went to the Debian Wiki's AptPinning page. It provided a few more recipe's of doing APT pinning. I particularly like the "only if I say so" approach.

But I still have some unanswered questions, so I went to the authoritative source—the man page of apt_preferences(5). This man page is on my hard drive all along. And to read a printed out copy I issued the command

[weiqi@gao]$ man -Tps apt_preferences | lpr

This six-page document contains explanations of every detail of the things that I need to do.

The steps

Here's the steps I took to get Sun JDK 6 to my Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 system (the right way):

1. Add a line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

   # deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 200704
   07-12:15]/ etch contrib main
   
   deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20070407
   -12:15]/ etch contrib main
   
   deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free
   deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free
   
   deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
   deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
   
   deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main
   deb http://www.dipconsultants.com/debian etch main
   
   ### unstable #######
   deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free

2. Add a line to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf:

   // Pre-configure all packages with debconf before they are installed.
   // If you don't like it, comment it out.
   DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs {"/usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt || true";};
   APT::Cache-Limit "100000000";

3. Created /etc/apt/preferences:

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=stable
   Pin-Priority: 700
   
   Package: *
   Pin: release a=unstable
   Pin-Priority: 600

4. Run apt-get update
5. Install the eight sun-java6-* packages
   • sun-java6-bin
   • sun-java6-demo
   • sun-java6-doc
   • sun-java6-fonts
   • sun-java6-javadb
   • sun-java6-jdk
   • sun-java6-jre
   • sun-java6-source
   with

   [root@gao]# feta install <package-name>s

   Notice that the sun-java6-doc package requires that I download the JDK documentation from Sun's Java download site and put the zip file in /tmp.