Up until recently it was my practice to download the Linux version of Sun’s JDK, do a “tar -czf” against it and then run the alternatives command to set up the links.
Since returning to CentOS from Ubuntu I decided to give the Sun rpm a try instead. The basic process was the same, the main difference being that by default Sun now creates a /usr/java/jdk-[version] directory with the JDK distribution in it and two symlinks. The aforementioned JDK directory is symlinked to /usr/java/latest/usr/java/default.
When running alternatives what I’ve been doing is to specify /usr/java/default/bin/java for the java executable, like this:
/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/default/bin/java 300
and then select the new install when configuring:
/usr/sbin/alternatives --config java
There are 2 programs which provide 'java'.
Selection Command
-----------------------------------------------
* 1 /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java
+ 2 /usr/java/default/bin/java
For desktop machines the only remaining task is symlinking the Java plugin from /usr/java/default/jre/plugin/i386/ns7 to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.