}

How to install Java (Oracle) the proper way on Ubuntu 16.04

2 min read

Introduction

We are going to describe the steps to install the Oracle JRE for Java. Ubuntu repositories does not provide Oracle Java, instead it provides open-jdk. To solve this issue we will add the webupd8team repository to apt.

Step 1: Adding webupd8team repository to apt

We will use the command add-apt-repository for adding the webupd8team repository with thew following commands:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update

Step 2: Install Java

Now we can install Java 6,7 or 8 check this package list:

  • oracle-java6-installer
  • oracle-java7-installer
  • oracle-java8-installer

Choose one package and install it with

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Step3: Select Oracle Java as the default JVM

Update: Optionally you can use the command sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-set-default to skip this step.

Now we are going to use update-alternatives command for selecting the java version we want to have as default:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

The output will be something like this:

There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).

Selection    Path                                            Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/bin/java          1062      auto mode
  1            /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java   1061      manual mode
  2            /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/jre/bin/java          1062      manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

Choose the right number (in our output the number 2) and you are ready to use Oracle Java.

Check the output of this command to verify everything is correct.

java -version