Wednesday, March 30, 2016

How to update Oracle JRE on Ubuntu

Finally I'm glad to be able to have my Ubuntu PPA's available on Launchpad.

I'm a Ubuntu user for desktop: I use it for my personal stuff as well for development.

In Brazil it is quite common that home banking makes use of signed Java applets for authentication process. I'll not discuss the security merits of such decision (specially considering that Oracle's wants to discontinue the availability of Java applets at all in the future), but for all those cases it is required to have the Sun/Oracle JVM. Free implementations of JRE won't do.

Meanwhile I was a happy user from WebUpd8 team PPA repository for a long time, I noticed that recently they were not updating it.

So I decided to go ahead and cook something myself to fix that. Actually, I was looking for something like the "jusched.exe" program available for Windows. Never understood quite well why Linux cannot have. JRE is also available in RPM packages but I was never a fan of RPM based distributions for desktop.

Anyway, the byproduct of this idea is ready to use and available on Github as well on it's own repository at https://launchpad.net/~glasswalk3r-yahoo/+archive/ubuntu/ubuntu-justched.

Not anything fancy, but it will download the latest JRE available for your Ubuntu and generated a DEB package for it automatically. In the future I might add a GUI for it to enable the user to install the package directly from it, but right now the setup process is manually (that is, you double click the DEB package and let Ubuntu take care of it for you).

Update: although the PPA was created for Ubuntu LTS 14.04, it will work as well on 16.04 (latest release).