Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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529
· janosgyerik

Setting up Java in Debian the right way

I've been using the OpenJDK, but I had some problems with it: apparently Android Studio and PyCharm are designed to work with Oracle's JDK, and as such there are known bugs and crashes with OpenJDK. To fix my instability issues I had to take the hint and switch to Oracle's.

Here's the official doc for setting this up in Debian:

https://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage

Following the explanations, I was able to convert Oracle's tarball to a deb package using make-jpkg, and with the update-alternatives examples I could set the default version to use correctly. (Before this I was setting JAVA_HOME and PATH by hand, which is dirty, don't do it.)

(Probably the same procedure applies to Ubuntu as well.)