Linux JDK 6 installation - the hard way.

To clarify few things :
- I'm not a big fan of java (or any other bloated framework, especially if major versions are not backwards compatible)
- I hate installers that do things that we could really live without, or without users consent (eyecandy, toolbars, auto updaters etc.)

Last week at work I wanted to get JDk6 for JBoss based project. Since there are no tar.gz/tgz versions for 6u31 (like for JDK7), I dl'ed the i586-bin installer. My office server is openSuse 12.1 x86_64. I tried running the installer in different combinations.

chmod 755 jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin
./jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin

sh jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin

Outcome was mostly the same :

jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin: line 113: ./install.sfx : Permission denied

Installer is mix of shell script - few hundred lines at beginning of the file, and a self extracting binary.
To determinate where the script ends and sfx starts run

less -N jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin

or

less jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin

and press = to see line numbers currently seen on screen.

exit 0
^?ELF^A^A^A^@^@^..............
jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin lines 144-189/327000 byte 5779/85292206 0%

To get the sfx part run

tail -n +189 jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin > install.sfx

To run (uncompress) the self extracting binary

chmod 755 install.sfx
./install.sfx

I thought that I got what I needed, but at start JBoss 6 spitted out weired error. So I tried to check if everything is fine with the JDK.

cd jdk1.6.0_31
./bin/java -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object

After some googlin' for a reason to what could be the cause of the problem, I found a forum post suggesting that rt.jar could be missing.

find ./ -name rt.*

returned :

./jre/lib/rt.pack

In bin folder I found unpack200

./bin/unpack200 --help

So I had the tool and means, next I had to find what needed to be unpacked

find ./ -name *.pack

returned :

./lib/tools.pack
./jre/lib/charsets.pack
./jre/lib/jsse.pack
./jre/lib/deploy.pack
./jre/lib/javaws.pack
./jre/lib/plugin.pack
./jre/lib/rt.pack
./jre/lib/ext/localedata.pack

So let's get to it

./bin/unpack200  ./lib/tools.pack  ./lib/tools.jar
.
.
./bin/unpack200  ./jre/lib/ext/localedata.pack  ./jre/lib/ext/localedata.jar

After that everything worked fine.
If any1 want's to take a look at the script part of the installer :

head -n 188 jdk-6u31-linux-i586.bin > install.sh