I’ve been meaning to try out the JPackage repository for a long time to manage the Java installations on my Fedora Linux installs at home. However, the documentation on the JPackage site is incomprehensible. I don’t see how anyone could possibly use it to install the Sun JDK for use with the JPackage repository with the nosrc rpm. It’s almost like they are daring you to use GCJ, which in my opinion, is a total waste of time. Even the instructions for the compat rpms are overly verbose.
Fortunately, I found some documentation for installing Java on CentOS. CentOS is a free-of-charge distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we use for our production servers at Voxify. Since Fedora is cut from the same cloth as RHEL and CentOS, I was hoping the instructions would work with minimal change, and I was right. A million thanks to the people who wrote that document.
I was able to follow the directions exactly as written, except for the need to first install libXp ($ sudo yum -y install libXp) and to change the 11 to 12 in the file references for the JDK, since the newest Java 5 distribution is now 1.5.0.12.
The Java 6 install is even easier, although it uses the compat rpm instead of the nosrc rpm. From my perspective, though, using the compat rpm is worth it for the time it saves.